Bit of an eclipse, sans vampires

Tags

acupressure points, banana bread, Broken heart, eclipse, energetic patterns, evil frickin’ genius, expectation of further injury, foxhole, Hanuman, Healing, heart meridian, Kinesiology, meridians, solar eclipse, unstuck, vampires, Yoga

Last Sunday (11^th July) the world experienced a total solar eclipse – and here’s a Vedic perspective on such things, if you’re interested.

An eclipse is a very interesting time – the earth being bathed shadows when there’s normally full daylight (even if we aren’t in the right geographic location to see it personally). Energetically, it’s a bit of a turnaround from our normal experience of the world. For example, consider how some plants and flowers close up at night, or how jetlag impacts us (different time zones and exposure to light when our body isn’t expecting it).

So I tend to interpret an eclipse as a bit of a pregnant pause and perhaps a resetting of certain energetic patterns in the world.

And in this sandhi, this time of change, I went back for my second week of yoga teaching, hoping that at least some of the people who called during the week would show up. They did!

Well, two of them did, anyway. There were meant to be teenage boys joining in, but they had that “yoga, yeah right!” look on their faces. So their social worker left a sixteen year old girl in my care while she and the boys did something else. The other lady was possibly in her 50’s and hadn’t done any yoga for around ten years.

It was so much fun! I’d arrived early to set things up (lighting some incense because the room – while bright and spacious – is a bit musty, music and getting my notes ready), but my students turned up early, too.

Teehee! I have students! 😀

So I didn’t have time to get nervous and we started with a bunch of questions – what’s yoga, what is it used for etc. I was a little surprised that even though I’d written a fairly short class plan, we didn’t get through it all. There was a lot of stopping to demonstrate things, and talk through frustrations (I’m 16; I should be more flexible than this!). I taught them how to enunciate “Aum” properly, the KYM-style breathing, some asana and we finished with a little meditation. The hour just flew by! Hopefully they are both coming back next week, and I’ve had two more calls from people wanting to come this week. So yay!

Right after that I cycled straight home as fast as I could, and caught a lift to the city with a friend who was also attending Nadine and Kerry’s yoga and kinesiology workshop. WHOOP-WHOOP!

The purpose of the workshop was to help us all get “unstuck”. Energetically, emotionally, physically – whatever we needed.

Given the imminence of the eclipse, I have to say nice work with the timing, ladies!

Nadine and Kerry opened by sharing stories, which I think is a lovely way to ease people into the vibe that’s being created. They spoke of the preparation for the workshop, their own stories of coming to yoga and kinesiology and some of the emotional/mental health issues they’d each faced.

It was a brilliant way to oh-so-gently say: Just like you, we’ve had (and sometimes still have) stuff that keeps us stuck. And it can and does get better!

Message received loud and clear, chicas!

Earlier in the week, we were asked to complete a survey focusing on the areas in our life where we feel stuck. As a follow up once we got started, we were asked to draw our “stuck”.

Then we got into the yoga portion of the day, led by Nadine. Some standing poses and sun salutations (creating heat and energy in a little room packed with yoginis!). Next, some more specific asana held for longer periods of time, specific to various meridians within the body that help us access our fears, frustrations, anger, implementing the plans of our heart (I LOVE that!), self-acceptance and love.

During this, I realised that my ongoing-nagging-refusing-to-get-better shoulder injury is tied into the heart meridian that runs out along both arms. Left side of the body is the feminine, right?

My broken heart and I have been working together for a while now, trying to plug all the gaps and heal every last drop of the pain…

BUT what I’ve suddenly realised just as I’m sitting here right now, is that there’s still a part of me that resists complete healing. Although I want to be free of this broken-ness, there’s a vocal minority somewhere in my body that says:

No! Don’t completely heal! We don’t want to go back to that really bad place again!! Right here, well, it’s manageable. So don’t go rocking the boat, okay?

Oh! So there’s an expectation of further injury. And lower than low expectations for any sort of lasting romantic happiness. Oh.

I guess it makes sense then, to create a blockage along the heart meridian in the form of a cycling accident. I mean, that’s one sure way to keep things nicely as-is.

[Excuse me while I take a moment to process this and let the tears pass]

…The same thing, I think, goes for my body’s refusal to lose weight. I mean, I do yoga, I swim, I cycle. I’m mostly a healthy eater. Regardless, my body is holding on to some of its external protection. And so I feel unattractive, which is just another way to stay safe from men being interested in me. That vocal minority of mine is an evil frickin’ genius!

Okay… let’s get back to describing the workshop now…

After a short break, Kerry took the reins for the kinesiology part. This involved holding certain acupressure points for each of the meridians we’d just accessed (kidney, liver, gall bladder, heart), and helping us tune into our own energetic states and blockages.

Before we moved on from holding one acupressure point to the next, Kerry asked us to repeat some affirmations. Some of those were harder to swallow than others (i.e. “I deserve to love my life”, “I forgive myself”, “I accept myself”, “I know I am enough”). Hmmm…

By the end of the workshop I felt very relaxed and quiet. My friend told me that “my face looked really open”. I have no idea what that means, but hey! All I said to her was that I needed to go home and write (duh!!).

After thanking Nadine and Kerry for a wonderful afternoon, my friend and I left. She was going out, but I was heading back to my warm and cozy foxhole.

That night I just wanted to sleep, and the same with the next night.

I knew that whatever was going on with me as a result of the workshop hadn’t yet surfaced. And although I started this post on Monday, I haven’t really looked at it for the last couple of days. Guess I needed more time to marinate!

Little did I realise that it was in writing about the workshop that the full realisations would come. And here they are. Probably with more to come.

So I’m just going to… ummm… go and make some more tea. Eat some (freshly made) banana bread and be a little quiet for a while.

~Svasti

The Workshop of Love – part 2

Tags

AC/DC, anahata, Asana, bandha, bhakti, bhava, Dinacharya, Hanuman, indifference, Intimacy, Krishnamacharya, Love, Mark Whitwell, Mudra, pranayama, strength receiving, sun salutations, Surrender, Valentine’s Day, Yoga

Photo liberated from Mark's Facebook profile 🙂

[Read part 1 first]

…You are a flower blooming in your own garden. Your first form arrived as one cell known as the heart. A spark of Life, initiated by male female, giving and receiving union of opposites, the catalyst of nurturing, your spirit took form and the source became seen…

Soft hands, suggests Mark as he levered apart my fierce anjali mudra. Soft like the heart, he smiles. His crinkly eyes smile at me, too. Whoah, that right there is a hit of the bhakti that envelopes Mark and all in his immediate vicinity!

We perform a series of sun salutations and the bhava is feeling, sensing, with no mention of strict ideas about alignment. Instead its – feel it, breathe it, and flow with the practice. Mark talks through the principals of Strength Receiving as we move and asks us to do our practice: Without drama or strain.

The end of the first day is full of anticipation of the next. The first six hours have already been so intense, but in a good way. A day of questions and answers, of movement and breath and most definitely, of heart openings. The kind that cause me to melt. This state of openness takes a little getting used to (every time) because my first reaction is always to protect myself. But here we are, ripping our chests open like Hanuman. On purpose. It’s both frightening and utterly glorious.

…For some of you this practice is too much, for others it’s not challenging enough. This is one of the problems with generic yoga classes. You need to find YOUR yoga – the yoga that’s right for you…

…According to the great “teacher’s teacher” T. Krishnamacharya, yoga must be adapted to the individual, not the individual adapted to the style of yoga. For your yoga practice to be most fruitful, it must be in harmony with your body type, age, health, and even cultural background…

Ideas to ruminate over.

I walk up to Mark to thank him for the last six hours but I’m almost speechless. He grins at me and envelopes me in a huge and long-lasting bear hug. ‘Nuff said!

That night on the other side of town, a few of us head out for dinner just down the road from Nadine’s apartment. But not Mark, who instead went with a friend to see AC/DC in concert. Yup, that’s right; he’s a rocker-yogi! Gotta love that!

Sunday afternoon – Valentine’s Day – we started the session with thoughts of a personalised practice, more questions and answers.

Having a yoga practice that is “mine”, and personalised to my body and needs is such an interesting concept. Especially when compared to the mass-market cookie-cutter approach of some of the stuff being sold as yoga out there.

I suspect that one of the reasons I was intimidated by yoga for a while there (many years ago now), is that I didn’t realise I could make it my own in this way, y’know? And then last year while doing yoga teacher training, I understood that on some level but still, no one ever said that explicitly and out loud!

But it makes so much sense! Bodies come in all shapes and sizes, and with all levels of mobility. The idea that you need to be flexible or picture perfect, or doing advanced poses to do yoga, is false.

I mean, some people report that they look around a class and find their competitive nature flaring up. Which can cause an attitude of feeling less than other people, OR feeling superior. Both are out of balance. Or perhaps a person will push themselves beyond their current capabilities in competition with themselves, which can easily result in injury. And despite what Mr Choudry might say, competition is not yoga!

Mark spoke about the male/female imbalance prevalent in most yoga classes (and by extension, in our communities). There are so many women in yoga classes, but hardly any men! And how that has to change if we’re going to make positive changes in the world. Generally speaking, men need to work at being more open and receptive, and women need to acknowledge their own power. Yoga is very good at helping people regain their balance in these ways. The surrender of Strength Receiving is both internal (from our Self, to our Self), as well as to between our Self and other people in our day to day lives.

And now that I think about it, “surrender” is a big part of the experience of feeling anahata chakra cracking open. The only way to co-exist with that state is to surrender! Essentially, indifference is a disorder of the heart.

One of Mark’s key teachings is around intimacy – with your Self, your body, your breath and your mind. And coming to terms with this concept as a part of my experience of yoga was interesting. I mean, my entire family for generations on both sides have shown no skill with expressing intimacy. It’s a long held, DNA-deep pattern, so how do you get better at intimacy when your natural pattern is to not really let people in? The answer of course, is that you have to start with yourself. And you have to give it a red hot go!

In yoga there’s a bunch of ways to do this – asana, pranayama, mudra, bandha, dinacharya, food etc. Intimacy with the self involves developing a sensitivity and awareness internally and externally and is therefore, inherently physical and sensate.

True intimacy isn’t about getting naked – although there’s nothing wrong with that! Instead, it is a quality that allows us to see, feel, know and realise in a very tangible way that we are but one heart, one organism, interconnected even as we appear separate.

Intimacy really starts to make sense within the context of yoga, as you move through your practice and use the breath to stay completely aware, moment to moment. The trick is that to really understand that, you have to do your practice and keep doing it!

Then you can extend what you’ve learned about yourself to how you deal with others. At least that’s the theory I’m working with so far…

…The ancient wisdom of yoga teaches that Life is already given to you, you are completely loved, you are here now. It teaches that we are not separate, cannot be separate from nature, which sustains us in a vast interdependence with everything…

It is true that we don’t have to go anywhere, or seek anything outside of ourselves in order to realise we are one and the same as god. However, I do think that for many people this message is too simple to accept. I know that twenty years ago, perhaps even only ten years ago I would not have been okay with that. Sometimes I think it takes lots of searching in order to realise there’s nowhere to go…

[Read part 3]

~Svasti

P.S. Once again, all quotes are from Mark Whitwell – things he said, his book and/or his Facebook status updates.