Posture in Action

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By Haleigh Smith, CYS 500RYT and Farm Manager

What has become very interesting for me as a Yoga teacher and a mover is recognizing asanas or posture among the natural, living movement that carries my body through the activities of daily life. I fold forward maybe a hundred times a day as I’m doing laundry, digging, raking, and every single time I reach for something I have dropped. I crawl, squat, kneel and move through variations of lunge in the garden and when I play with children. Side bends and twists are sprinkled throughout all foundations so that by the end of the day I have done more asanas and embodied more joint configurations than I care to tally here or anywhere.

I see my asana practice as just that– a practice. This is the sacred time and place that I designate to process and explore new patterns that become integral to the way I interface with my world. The principles and techniques of yoga are the platforms with which I assess what is happening in my body, mind, and heart so that I can honor all three with the creative reconciliation of giving them my attention. If what is learned during my practice stays only on my mat, then what exactly is it that I believe I am practicing for?

It is silly to think that I would or even could always treat posture and the many necessary transitions with as much reverence and curiosity as I do my asana practice. What I do believe is that I can practice graceful, honest movement, which is guided by breath and supported by attention. I can practice yoga off of my mat. Anywhere, in fact, and at any time.  In this way, I am provided with endless opportunities to stay rooted in the awesome sensation that each moment has to offer.

Digging and Shoveling Split-Leg Stance

A handy consequence of this application of yoga is that I am able to pay homage to my body as I complete tasks that have the potential to cause wear and tear.  In the photos, I am pictured shoveling, which can be very hard on the body if care is not taken to move well. In the following paragraphs, I will detail setting up this posture for use, with key factors that will begin with the feet hip-width distance apart, and then step one foot straight back, maintaining the distance between the feet widthwise as you do step. Square the hips forward. If you’re unable to do so comfortably, either increase the distance between the feet widthwise or decrease the distance between the feet lengthwise.

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Once you are positioned to prioritize the hips comfortably squaring forward, ground to the outer edges of the feet and add a subtle internal spiraling action on each foot. To do this, spiral each foot inwards, towards the center line of your body without moving the foot or losing the outer edge groundedness. Keep a bend in the front knee and lengthen the legs in both directions. Continue reading

TWO AMAZING RECIPES FOR YOUR HOLIDAY DELIGHT

THAT ARE ALSO DARN GOOD FOR YOU!

Maca or Ashwagandha Balls and Hot Cacao & Reishi Latte

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BY CIRCLE YOGA SHALA’S, CHEF DAVA

Maca or Ashwagandha Balls

Use Maca if you want energy and focus or if you want to balance your hormones. Use Ashwagandha if you want to relax, sleep well and regulate your thyroid and adrenal systems. Though they are both adaptogens, I wouldn’t put them in the same Ball, as they are meant for opposite reactions in your body via, energy and relaxation.  You will notice more effect by taking them separately.

You have to have a Cuisinart/food processor for this one.

  • 2 tsp melted coconut oil or ghee
  • 1/2 cup sunflower seeds
  • 1-2 T Raw honey
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • 3/4 cup almonds or cashews or a mix of both
  • 1/4 cup desiccated coconut
  • 1/2 tsp cinnamon
  • 2 tsp Ashwagandha or Maca

Add all of these ingredients to your food processor and pulse until you have a sticky dough that holds together. Add a little extra coconut oil or ghee if the balls don’t hold together.  Add Ghee or Coconut oil to your hands next little and shape them into balls. Store in the fridge in a covered container and eat them at your leisure.

Maca Powder is a super adaptogen. Adaptogens go to work in you as regulators helping your body do its daily balancing act. Maca is most known for giving you amazing energy, mood, focus and for balancing estrogen. Gals say goodbye to those night sweats and hot flashes and say goodbye to postmenopausal depression too. For you fellas, Maca can increase your libido and make you more fertile and help with performance. Hoo Ha! Maybe a little more trial and error on that one, wink wink.

Ashwagandha is one of Ayurveda’s most revered medicines. It is highly indicated as a fall and winter remedy because of its warming energy. It’s kind of stinky so using it in these balls really helps to mask its horsey smell. It is key for balancing Vata Dosha. It is useful for so many things that it is hard to mention them all. It goes deeply into your tissues and It can help regulate your immune, neurological, endocrine and reproductive systems. I love it best for its ability to lower stress. I have an underachieving thyroid and tired adrenals and this is my go-to herb. Try mixing a tsp of Ashwagandha and a pinch of Nutmeg into your Golden milk at night for deep sleep. I’ll give you that recipe in January!

Hot Cacao & Reishi Latte

  • 1 cup water
  • 1 cup favorite milk (Goat, Cow, Almond, Coconut, etc)
  • 1 T Cacao powder
  • 1 tsp reishi mushroom powder
  • 1 tsp ghee or coconut oil
  • Pinch of cardamom and cinnamon
  • Pinch of sea salt
  • 1-1/2 T of maple syrup or agave

Serves 2 yogis

Instructions:

Add all your ingredients to a small pot and bring to a simmer (low boil) for a few minutes.

Next, you will want it to be good and frothy, right? Use an immersion blender to blend it to a froth or do what I do and put it in your vita mix.

Yum!

Here is a little info I gathered from the internet on Reishi and Cacao. I love this new trend of edible adaptogens.  There are great products being made as well as supplemental powders that you can add to your own recipes. These highly revered and timeless natural adaptogens, fungi and mood boosters are trendy right now, but I can easily see why.  You can buy all of these boosters online or at your local health food store. As a perc, they are user-friendly, too. When I know I won’t have time for a cacao break midday, I blend the Reishi into my morning coffee for an effortless superpower kind of day.

Reishi Mushrooms are prized for their ability to strengthen your immune system, fight cancer, decrease anxiety and depression, balance your blood sugar and they help you sleep at night!

Raw Cacao is full of phytonutrients and flavonoids. These properties make cacao responsible for weight loss, euphoria, muscle, and nervous system regulation and are even constipation relieving. Oh my, it does so much more and doesn’t forget the best thing! It is chocolate…

Enjoy this drink all winter long and please let us know if you like it, Hugs!

Silence

Meditating at the Shala

Meditating at the Shala

“Silence is the first and last teacher.”

Ramana Maharshi

As the New Year began, I think it’s safe to bet that many resolved to give themselves to this endeavor:  To sit on their cushions for a little time each day, to turn their attention to the deep silence within.  This sounds delightful doesn’t it?  But the reality is quite different.  For most, what we find is not silence but an unrelenting mind screaming for our attention like an abandoned child.

This morning, looking out over the shala from my desk where I like to sit in contemplation, I invited silence and within nanoseconds the mind was serving up distractions, providing running lists of to-do activities, and anything it could to get me moving again.  This is the way of the mind. I do not try to turn it off.  Frankly, I don’t recall ever turning it on.  So the mind is not the way to access our deeper self where true intelligence resides.   

The way to silence is through the doorway of the senses – not in the usual functioning – but rather through tending to them with one’s attention, consciously inviting a felt experience of them.

Next time you sit try this practice:

  • Turn your attention to feeling yourself in contact with the object(s) you’re sitting on.
  • Fix your gaze in stillness and locate yourself in the room with your peripheral vision – see yourself, and see the room at the same time.   If you prefer your eyes closed then look into the back of your eyelids with the awareness of seeing while simultaneously staying connected to your space.
  • Open your ears to hear everything that is available to hear.
  • Smell what is available to smell.
  • Keep the arrow of your attention in two directions:  aware of everything that you can be aware of through sensing  – not thinking about – and stay aware of yourself.
  • Breathe
  • Continue to sense and feel, and relax deeply.

The silence experienced is not void, but rather full – full of presence and clarity.  A felt connection to our state of being that sees and knows, free from analysis and memory, where our intuitive wiser selves reside.

Samapatti: Accessing Your Flow State

Join our workshop on FLOW September 17th – 19th at Yoga Deza, Fayetteville, AR.

Yoga is a revelation-based technology.  As the great sage Vyasa is supposed to have said: “Yoga is Samadhi”. From its purely meditative strains to its more modern physical expressions, yoga expresses a unique reverence for FLOW: absorption, effortless attention, and aesthetic epiphany.

Modern Neuro-Scientists and psychologists have found that the people who are the happiest and the healthiest are those that spend the most time absorbed in the FLOW.

Learn about subtle changes you can make in the rhythm of your practice, in the nature of your efforts, and how to tune the challenges you create for yourself such that FLOW is likely to emerge.

When flow is happening “downloading” of new information is possible which directs our growth, our understanding of purpose and our evolution.

 

 

An Interview with Matt: The Yoga Tradition and the Mysore Palace

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Matt and I have been engaging in some very lively conversations up here on the mountain. Those discussions have primarily revolved around two  books. Thanks to the unrelenting snow storms there has been lots of time to read!  I decided that a creative way to include you in the conversation would be to interview Matt.    (1st posting in a series)

Q:  You just read N.E.  Sjoman’s book, The Yoga Traditon and tbe Mysore Palace, and Mark Singleton’s Yoga Body: the History of Modern Posture Practice.  Why do you think these books are important to today’s practitioners of Yoga?

A:  Each book is an attempt to trace the set of conditions that gave rise to Asana’s – – or the practice of posture – – becoming the central focus of “Yoga” in the West. It’s interesting that the traditional texts of Hatha Yoga (like the Hatha Yoga Pradipika) do not describe elaborate sequences of postures, linked together in very specific rhythms of movement and stillness; nor are there any standing postures to speak of in the Shiva Samhita. The original texts on Hatha are rather oriented strongly toward the practice of single postures for long periods of time, and are steeped in pranayama, bandha, and the akarmas or kriyas much more than today’s styles. So, why the modern equation of Asana as Yoga, and why these forms that we have?

Because we are practicing a hybridized art form, there is actually no definitive answer to these questions, but one thing is clear: most of us who have been practicing for a long time have been told various stories and legends about the origins of what we do, often in an attempt to ground our style of practice in the reaches of antiquity, and thus confer onto it a degree of mystique and authenticity. This orientation derives from the human tendency to value things because they are representative of an ancient lineage. Patthabi Jois for instance asserted that the sun salutation could be found in the Rig Veda, perhaps the oldest written text we know of. But there is simply no reason to see this as anything other than a creative act of interpretation on his part. The postural sequence we know as the sun salutation was in fact conceived by the Raja of Aundht, Pratinidhi Pant – – himself an avid body builder. Pant solidified this form and popularized it for the public. So it was a body builder who came up with the sequence for the purpose of advancing bodybuilding technology. Notably, according to Singleton, suryanamaskar and other techniques like it “. . . were not recognized as yoga” at the turn of the nineteenth century. (location 2472 kindle). Continue reading

Surrendered Action, Free from Habit

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Moving from and with Source

. . . . “In the state of surrender we begin to learn how to act in a way that is free from habit”. 

I was recently emailed about this statement from my last blog entry: “Yoga and the 3rd Step of AA.”  To act in a way free from habit is to move from a place below the level of ordinary mind, beyond reflexive, habitual responses fueled by memory and personal preferences of like and dislike. We know we are moving from ordinary mind when our internal dialogue involves words like ‘need’ and ‘should’, ‘could’ and ‘would’, for example.   Anytime those words are present there is a latent wish for reality to be other than it is, and that is an indication that our actions are unfolding in an orientation governed by past learned responses. Moving in the surrendered way is not mutually exclusive to conditioned action, it actually has that mode of action at its disposal at all times, but there is another element to surrendered moving that is important to understand, because it creates space for new responses to ever changing situations. Continue reading

Into the Pot

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Blog entry by Rihab, a Physics Professor, Yoga Teacher, and Shala Apprentice

Family

One of the most gratifying feelings in my life has been the feeling of being surrounded and nurtured by family, really close family.  Only second to this is the feeling arising in a romantic relationship early in its developmental stage.  I grew up in Damascus, Syria, and to a Syrian, family is the center piece in life around which everything else revolves.

I arrived at Circle Yoga Shala on May 19, 2013 to enjoy a week of relaxation, followed by a two-week apprenticeship.  I had visited the farm the previous summer for a few days on two different occasions.  I had felt the genuine welcoming by everyone on the farm in the preceding year.  However, when I finally settled into my apprenticeship, I recognized the old feeling I grew up with while in Syria: that of being surrounded by a real family.  The Shala felt like home to me, and I became attached to it in a similar manner to my attachment to my first home in Damascus.

I was the kitchen apprentice on the farm.   Continue reading

Yoga and the 3rd Step of AA

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STEP 3: MADE A DECISION TO TURN OUR WILL AND OUR LIVES OVER TO THE CARE OF GOD AS WE UNDERSTOOD HIM.

First, don’t let the usage ‘him’ be the end before you even begin.   AA is not concerned with the face – or lack thereof – of God for you.  It is only concerned with your opening to a power greater than yourself.  The ‘as we understood him’ admits from the get-go that your higher power now will certainly evolve and change over time, and that is not a problem.

The Yoga Tradition takes the same view.  The word for God is Ishvara, and Ishvara is neuter.  This is important to understand because the tradition is not concerned with dictating a particular form for God. What is important about Ishvara to the yogi is that “his” actions do not originate in ignorance (avidya).

The third step is a culmination and integration of the first two: we begin to accept that our life is unmanageable and that we have no control over it, that we don’t actually see reality as it is, which is a form of insanity. From this perspective the only action that is clear is complete surrender. Continue reading

From 3 to 33: Becoming a Yogini

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My Story of yoga and dance

I was 3 when I took my first dance class and in a couple months I will turn 33. Dance was the only thing I ever knew for sure I loved as a child – well let’s face it, also as an adult – and as I grew older I also knew it was the only thing that had kept me whole in times of trial, though I never could have explained why.

As a young adult, dancing, teaching and working in Washington, DC, I found myself drawn to yoga as a supplement to my dancing. Too poor to afford classes I landed a work/study job at a local studio in Adams Morgan. In exchange for classes the owner tasked me with transcribing the many notebooks that she had accumulated from her training in India. Previously I’d only known yoga as a series of postures and the experience of those on my mat. But as I typed, I slowly began to see, through her short-hand, the underpinnings of an ancient tradition, embodied in the wisdom of generations of yogis, and how deliberately that wisdom had been given to me  – – – as if it had started to “wink” at me from the depths of history. Continue reading

Meet Carl Faulkner, the monk on the mountain.

Meet Carl

An early start

When asked, I typically start my formal search around age ten, reading the Bible cover-to-cover for the second time and deciding on two things: one, that I was not a very good Christian and two, that I was going to be a minister.  In hindsight, since I left the church a few years later,  I can conclude that I was at least correct about the first.

After a twenty year hiatus, during which I pursued my degrees in engineering and worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs, I encountered meditation in the late 90s while working on my doctorate.  While taking the free “yoga” classes at the university in an attempt to increase flexibility while training for marathons, my daily diligence apparently impressed the instructor and she invited me to her meditation group.  At that meeting, her teacher quickly realized that my diligence was not yet in the right direction and he simply advised me to keep doing yoga.  However, another member of that group presented a slide show that evening about his retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh in Plum Village and I found myself thinking that it looked like fun, immediately followed by the question, why exactly does that look like fun?  Since I had little money at the time, a trip to Plum Village was not possible, but I did end up reading several books, reconciling myself with my Christian roots, and later moved to California to work in Silicon Valley, where I had money, but no time. Continue reading