By Ali Van Putten

Originally published here via Rebelle Society

“Yoga is the practice of tolerating the consequences of being yourself.” ~ Dinabandhu Sarley

Technically speaking, Yoga translates to union, to yoke and it’s described as a path. We follow it, with the intention (that’s a Yoga word too) to joyfully join the small self to the larger self, to improve these selfs and take the bait of believing there is a better version of ourselves out there.

And at first it seems to be working, the practice does something.

You feel a good vibe for thirty minutes after class. Your forearms get toned. You put up quotes about staying present and finally learn how to balance on your head. Not to mention on Wednesdays, after your 6:15 pm Hot Core Power Class, you don’t hate your partner quite as much.

Something is, for sure, happening. But that’s all fleeting, temporary, and unfortunately, not Yoga.

When you really start practicing Yoga, there will be moments you’re going to wish, to beg, that it was that temporary and that you could go back to before, but you can’t. When you step on that mat, with a true teacher in an authentic studio, be warned, a giant storm is headed your way.

Yoga will teach you about awareness.

Yoga is about looking at your sh*t; your garbage, those putrid and rotten pieces of you that you deny, repress and continuously reject in other people. It’s about the neurosis and habits that you catch yourself indulging in behind your own back, that you hide in Tupperware containers in your closet, and even those parts of you that, on reflex, you would spit on, if they were openly displayed by a stranger you passed on the street.

What’s worse, the practice doesn’t make any of it go away, like a good quick fix should, but instead lays it all out on the front lawn for you and all the neighbors to see, and arms with you two of the most perplexing questions for the human mind to struggle with: Who am I? and What now?

Yoga will teach you about breath.

One day, Yoga will allow you to value this human breath. First it will slowly, painfully, strip away your labels, your entire identity up until this point and the convenient tags and filters you use to matter to the world, to be a big deal and to feel, however falsely, like enough.

When through practice, through chanting and singing for truth, you are robbed of these and left trembling, alone, scared, swimming in the oblivion of doubt, then you will sit, in the prison of your own creation, with one tool, one companion, one solution, one small technique towards freedom: the very rhythmic, and consistent rise and fall of your chest. And you will be so grateful that when everything else you accumulated left you, this, this one force remained and gave you life.

Yoga will teach you about commitment.

Those who practice Yoga, and practice Yoga seriously, do it because they are suffering from a very tragic and debilitating disease — awareness, the constant agitation of existing in this world as a semi-conscious human. They can’t not practice, it’s not a choice; it’s a ritual born out of survival, to save the self from the self.

With time and repetition, most experiences and people in life lose their luster, become mundane, habitual and predictable; we walk around convinced by our minds that we know it all, wanting what we don’t have and waiting for our lives to be different. Nothing is ever enough. But the mat never gives you the same experience twice, mirroring how you are never the same participant, and you taste a very unique moment: the ability to find variety and wisdom in conscious and precise repetition. To find excitement in the old, in a practice that is ancient.

Yoga will teach you about drishti.

When you get to that point, where your practice is you, you’ll begin to have eyes that can truly see and a body that can feel. This sounds lovely, but it will mainly suck. This is where life becomes extremely uncomfortable. Most people, very smart ones, do not want to feel, and steer clear from Yoga with good reason, because when you feel, it is awful. When you see, it is ugly, it is raw, and it fiercely contradicts the decorative stories on repeat in your mind.

It is incredibly awkward to be a vulnerable, naked, sensitive being in this distracted, over stimulated, grasping, aggressive society.

When you see that you have no power over own pathetic nature, and yet have all the power to choose how you see this mess of broken pieces, then you realize that you actually have something to practice. You have a purpose. You have direction. You, my friend, have a drishti.

Yoga will teach you about perspective.

One afternoon, while on the path, you’ll fall flat on your face. And you’ll be angry. You’re on a well-groomed path and some asshole forgot to do their job and left this pothole here. What you’ll miss in your ignorance is noticing that the pothole is one you created, and is made of quicksand that sucks you in and spits you out — bruised, bandaged and on crutches. The path exists, only to show you that there is no path, no trail to follow, no end to reach and not even a trace of breadcrumbs to hold you over till you find another outlet.

Without the security of victimization, the relief of control, ripped of the ability to blame, to make it you versus me, to manipulate and compete, you will have to wake up each morning with the dreaded realization, in own personal Groundhog Day nightmare, that any perceived negative experience came to you because you made it that way. You choose to see it that way. You created it with that bastard devil on your right shoulder, your mind. And you, and only you, can turn that sh*t upside down at any given moment in time.

Yoga will teach you about alignment.

Within you, at all times exists the potential for a steady, powerful, connection to the earth that will fill you up and make you whole. When you perfect standing on your own two feet, you have a shot, a fleeting chance, at having the resemblance of a positive ongoing relation, or connection to another being.

You’ll be reminded of this, when every prior relationship falls short and that moment comes, when you’re forced to swallow the fact that no one loves in the ways they promised. Not the woman who put her two feet in stirrups to birth you into this world, the man who stood beside you and spoke of health and sickness or the perfect goldfish you scored from the county fair at age 1o that gave you your first taste of impermanence and death. And it’s no flaw within them, but a function of the human contradiction, we seek the love from the outside that we can only experience inside, when you grasp this verse grasping other people, then and only then will you understand how life-threatening it is for you to prioritize the act of standing in the center of your own being, construct your own set of pompoms, and admit that there is no help coming.

Yoga will teach you about awareness. 

You will see clearly that presence is no gift. You’ll watch others complain, blame, gossip and stuff their minds, bodies and apartments with excess as if they’re standing on the deck of the sinking Titanic, as if it’s a delicacy, while you have to sit by and witness, participate and even love them because in that awareness you see that you are them. And that disgusts you.

Separation is easy, it provides an out, an equation to consistently divide our way out of any experience by fractioning out our connection to it, our willingness to admit that its happening, and that — in some big or small way — we’re a part of it.

Awareness is mostly the deflating vision of how incredibly unaware we really are and how much of our life is lived, not out there with others, but trapped within our own head, mangled in stories and imprisoned in unquestioned beliefs.

Yoga will teach you about humility.

Yoga will hold up a mirror while you thrash and kick at the reflection until you bleed on every last shred of glass and then let you pick out the shards, piece by piece, forcing you to have intimate contact with your wounds and see who you really are over and over.

And when you’re done being your own punching bag, you’ll see that it was just training camp and a dry run for the main event, a lifetime of being those bowling lane side bumpers against your own mind and the rest of the unconscious world.

And yes, Yoga will teach you about love. 

Because like love, Yoga is a state of being.

Yoga begs you to ask, do you love yourself enough to know yourself? And then once you see who you are, can you stomach living your entire life with this knowledge and truth of all your potential that gets beaten up daily by all your self-imposed limitations?

Yoga, like love, pushes you to start a ruckus, make a mess and tear open the twisted desires of your complex human heart, to rage so that you feel alive and finally touch the fire, passion, drive and aching burn for truth that makes up your core, your soul.

This is why most people do not want to practice Yoga. Why in the West we prefer Yoga Light, we fuse it, we take the pretty parts and leave the ugly, because that’s what we do with our own selves.

It is said that to love something, you must first hate it, and that is the gift of Yoga — it provides the repetition and awareness you need to break into a million pieces, deconstruct and rebuild yourself into something beautiful.

The Monday night Shafer Insurance class is moving due to construction – regular students will be meeting at Balanced You Studios at 5:30PM each Monday. See you there!

We’re located near the top of Bearden Hill at 6712 Kingston Pike in the Newton Jones Insurance Building, top floor.

by Sally Kempton

Originally posted here in Yoga Journal

Giselle liked the way meditation made her feel. Problem was, she told me, she just couldn’t get herself to sit regularly. She’d been on several meditation retreats. She had set up a little space just for sitting. But she kept resisting a daily practice. As we talked, she revealed that she was experiencing resistance in other areas of her life, too. She planned to start graduate school but couldn’t get herself to choose her courses. Her boyfriend wanted them to move in together, but when she thought about it, she felt trapped.

I asked her to spend a couple of minutes summoning up the feeling of resistance. “It feels kind of irritable,” she said, “like a kid saying, ‘You can’t make me.’ It’s as if something great is waiting to come to me, but I just keep pushing it away. I can’t open myself up to the promise, but I can’t quite let go of it either.”

Giselle was expressing one of the most puzzling paradoxes of the human organism—the way we resist not only life’s difficulties but also life’s potential sweetness. I notice it in students and certainly in myself: the subtle tendency to hold back from anything that changes the balance in our lives. We don’t just resist something unpleasant, like working with a difficult health issue or recognizing the need to leave a job. We often have a strange resistance to, say, getting a massage or opening fully to a friend or lover, or, especially, allowing an emerging state of inner expansion—even when we sense that we’re cutting ourselves off from something great.

Of course, resistance is sometimes appropriate; if you didn’t have the ability to say no, to resist or filter some of what comes at you, you’d be overwhelmed. The body’s immune system is built precisely for this purpose: to resist invaders in the form of bugs and bacteria. Your psychological immune system is also built to keep out intruders. By the time you’ve grown up, it usually consists of a series of energetic boundaries and gateways that you’ve built to keep out hostile energies, potentially toxic situations, and exploitative relationships. If you did not have that network of resistances, you’d be vulnerable to every form of suggestion, subtle or obvious.

Emotional Armor

The problem, as Giselle discovered, happens when the psychological immune system doesn’t know when or how to let down its boundaries. Then resistance stops being a useful filtering device and becomes a wall, a kind of armor. Sometimes the habit of resisting is so deeply ingrained that you can’t tell whether your inner “no” is a legitimate warning or just obstructive.

So you can live for years with a tendency to resistance that reveals itself in insidious ways: as an inclination to slide away from intimacy; a habit of avoiding difficult emotions by sleeping or watching TV; or simply the onset of restlessness, anxiety, or boredom that keeps you from resting in the present moment. Then, when you truly want to make a change, the wall of resistance can seem impenetrable.

This is an arena where yoga and meditation are of tremendous help. In my meditation practice, I’ve learned how to work with my own resistance to change, my tendency to hold back from moving deeper into any form of closeness, including closeness with myself. I’ve taken a hard look at my resistance to (read: fear of!) losing control and even accepting love.

And as I’ve developed the ability to meet resistance in meditation, I’ve found the same ability transferring to my broader life. When I learned how to make good on my commitment to sit and meditate regularly, I overcame a lifelong tendency to procrastinate and gave up the comfortable habit of picking up a novel or going to lunch rather than working on an overdue report. As I developed a willingness to stay present with difficult emotions when they surfaced during practice, I found it infinitely easier to deal with those emotions during my daily life.

Developing an awareness of your resistance style is the first step in working with it. And identifying some of the subtler forms of resistance can help you move through barriers that you may not have recognized as being of your own making. As you read the following scenarios, see which form is showing up in your life.

The Avoidance Factor

Of course, the most basic form of resistance is the kind that simply keeps you from doing what you intend to do. You totally planned to practice before dinner. But you remember a phone call you meant to make. You answer one more email. Then you notice the mess on the coffee table and automatically begin to straighten it up. Pretty soon, your free half hour is over and it’s time for your dinner date. Since this level of resistance effectively cuts you off from practice, you need some basic strategies for facing into it, for persuading yourself to just sit on your cushion or unfurl your mat.

You might try to entice yourself by thinking of the benefits you’ll experience (“I’ll feel calmer and happier!”) or by persuading yourself to live according to your priorities (“Life is short. A sense of peace beats a clean house any day!”).

For Giselle, I suggested a Pavlovian method—she would promise herself a treat if she’d sit for 10 minutes with full presence and no expectations. After a few weeks of sitting through her initial resistance, she found that she had developed a habit of sitting and that her body itself was telling her it was time to meditate, just the way it told her when she needed to eat. Yes, after a while she was even able to discontinue the treat!

The Distraction Defense

You might think that getting yourself to practice is as good as winning the battle against resistance, but unfortunately that’s just not so. Myriad forms of resistance come up for all of us, in the midst of practice itself.

Continue reading here on Yoga Journal

BY JENNIFER BARRETT originally posted here in Yoga Journal

John, a longtime yoga practitioner, is a strict vegetarian who follows the ancient yogic dietary recommendations to the letter. Jane, a beginning student, likes her steak medium-rare. John feels that animal flesh is a product of violence. Jane contends that eating meat helps sustain her practice. Who’s on the right track?

With the increased popularity of yoga in America (a carnivorous country by Mother India’s standards), many practitioners have found themselves caught in a dietary dilemma: Can you still enjoy that chicken salad sandwich and call yourself a yogi?

Certainly the moral principle of ahimsa, or nonharming, would seem to mandate asking the question. “Most yoga schools and teachers really favor vegetarianism for this reason,” says Georg Feuerstein, Ph.D., president of the Yoga Research and Education Center in Northern California. Nonmeat dietary instructions also figure in classic yoga manuals like the Hatha Yoga Pradipika and Bhagavad Gita.

But as Donald Altman, author of Art of the Inner Meal, explains, the issue of meat is just one aspect of a much broader yogic view of food. According to Hindu perspectives, he says, “all food possesses different properties that affect our body, awareness, and spirit.” Tamasic foods like beef and pork make us slow, lazy, and dull. Rajasic foods like fish and fowl stir up aggression and ambition. That leaves sattvic foods like fruits, beans, whole grains, and vegetables, which foster balance and good health. Looking at diet this way, meat represents just part of a nutritional continuum.

For many yogis, the body (rather than the ancient texts) informs eating choices. John Schumacher, founder of Unity Woods Yoga Center near Washington, D.C., has been a lacto-ovo vegetarian for more than 25 years. “I came to vegetarianism by simply adjusting my diet according to how it seemed to affect my practice,” he explains.

Donna Farhi, a yoga instructor based in New Zealand, also listened to her body for cues, but got a different message. A vegetarian as a teen, she found herself prone to dizzy spells in her 20s. When an acupuncturist suggested she try a little meat, Farhi was reluctant at first. “But I felt so much better—I let my body rather than my intellectual dogma guide me.”

Sandy Blaine, a teacher in Alameda, California, shares this experience. But while the fish she eats each week improves her energy, she says that “as a serious yogi, it is somewhat of a conflict for me. I do believe all life is sacred.”

Vegetarian or not, most teachers agree that the best decision comes from an honest look at your diet’s affect on your body and spirit. As Blaine explains, “Part of being a yogi is becoming conscious. Making self-reflective, honest choices is the first step toward living by the yamasand the niyamas.”

Relax. Renew. Restore. The next Restorative Session with Patty Dougherty is scheduled for November 14th, 7:00 – 9:00 PM.

Spaces go quickly for this class, so connect with Patty soon to reserve a space – 951-6024 or pattyyogamail@gmail.com. $25 for a single, $40 for a couple.