There seems to be a lot of competitive yoga out here. Everyone I knew from my past is either a yoga teacher now or studying to be a yoga teacher or was a yoga teacher and have moved beyond yoga teaching to simply being a yogi. I have studied yoga off and on for the last 10 years and practice my own discipline which goes something like this:
I wake up and I think to myself, oh god, I should do some yoga. Then I roll over and ask god why it so damned cold in Seattle and making it so easy to stay in bed and then I roll again over onto my back and practice shivasina. For those of you who do not know the pose, it is the final pose in yoga where you lay flat on your back and are still for five minutes. Most yogi masters say this is the hardest and most important position to master, and that is why I have been practicing it. I do it in bed because I've been doing that visualization yoga where I imagine myself in all the poses and going from move to move and then just finish the practice in my bed, on my back. My yoga practice is no where near performance level. But I can go so deep into shivasina it almost appears as if I am sleeping but the trained yogi know that I am simply deep in my kundalini chi and rebalancing my karmic wheel using deep, slow breath and it only looks like sleep if you're doing it right. If I start to drool a little, well, that just shows how far "into" my "meditation" I can go.
I've tried a couple different disciplines of yoga: Hatha which is very hard and disciplined not to mention painful and Vinayasa which is slow and easy and focuses on the smooth movement of breath and body. I stuck with studying Vinayasa yoga or flow or sometimes called Vinay yoga. I don't respond well to pain of any kind. Vinayasa is about synchronization of the breath and the movement; slowly integrating and challenging the body to stay in breath during each sequence of postures. It is not competitive.
Have you heard about "hot yoga"? Hot yoga or Bikram yoga is taught in a hot room (about 100 degrees) and the practice jumps from posture to posture completing 26 poses in 90 minutes. The man who created it, Bikram Choudhury is a self-proclaimed yoga champion. I don't know of any yoga Olympics or even amature competitions around the world so how do you become a yoga champion? Who judges these events? What kind of award do you get and how can you compete against a personal practice?
Beware of the self-proclaimed yoga champion.
Maybe it was a stroke of genius to decide to turn the thermometer up to 105 degrees and jump through a bunch of poses and I am sure as hell that there is a rush from doing it. I've been in a sweat lodge and when you are in intense heat for a specific amount of time, all sorts of stuff comes up and out of your body...emotions, toxins, memories. But I've found the people practicing hot yoga tend to be those who are not interested in doing the interpersonal journey that evolves from yoga but are more focused on results. You can get a smoking' hot body from practicing yoga, don't get me wrong. You can get a smoking hot body from just about any kind of physical practice, but yoga and pilates are practices that challenge the body the way that incorporates physics and the physical. A secrete for really great abs aren't doing crunches, it is practicing yoga using Pranayama breath or yogic breath that asks you to exhale deeply pushing all the air out of your diaphragm thus doing a natural crunch and holding that for a moment until it is uncomfortable pushing yourself deeper without breath. Plus you will increase your intake breath doing this practice. And it's a great way to get high.
I jest about my rolling over and practicing shivasina in the morning, but truly, there is a lot to be said for being able to sit in whatever is coming up for you and allow it to be. Eckhart Tolle says that the creation of space around the unpleasantness will naturally shift the emotion into acceptance. That the resistance of what is, is where the problem lay thus deepening the "pain body" and that is what ever is causing us pain. Identification with the pain body is where misery lay. My tendancy is to resist the negative thoughts...decide I don't need them and stay in denial of them then I go into mental arguments with my thoughts. The thoughts can be anything but typically sound like this: "I should be___________!" It doesn't matter what the blank is...it can be anything: thin, successful, rich, married, blond, naked. It doesn't matter at all what the self-judgment is, simply having the thought of being less-than is enough to cause a spiral into other negative thoughts.
Thoughts create emotions. It's not the other way around. Having a practice to stay out of the thought and into the moment is what my work is now. So some days it will include me doing shivasina in bed on cold rainy spring Seattle days. Sometimes that is the most I can do.
So much love,
All the way from over here...
Linda
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