My during and after Bhakti Fest newsletter notes.....

As I write this, it’s 1 A.M. and I can hear Bhagavan Das chanting off in the distance, the echo of mantra is carried along the just-past-the-new-moon night air. After delivering Joni Allen, one of Dave Stringer’s bandmates just in time for sound check, dancing through their set and then marveling at the divine storytelling of MC Yogi’s raps, I’m sitting next to Kasey Luber as she completes the editing of the Give Love Tour video for the opening day of Bhakti Fest.

It can be a challenge to bring together all the things that need to happen in order to leave the routine, confines, spontaneity, freedom, restrictions and familiarity of our everyday life in order to engage in an experience beyond the everyday. When we do, whether it is for the timespan of a Yoga class, the commitment of a retreat or the exploration of deeper study, it offers us the potential for transformation that we can then integrate back into the sacred dance of our everyday life. In the friendly festival atmosphere of Bhakti Fest, we have the opportunity to remember the joy that comes from participating in community, in fellowship. It’s a joy that reverberated amidst the Joshua tree sentinels throughout the desert as MC Yogi exhorted everyone to refrain, “Ganesh is Fresh.”

What is fresh and never goes stale is the mantra of friendship, the repetition of what it really means to support each other, to have each others’ backs, to smile and laugh and giggle and know that even amidst the angst, the mistakes, the stress, the misanthropy, the glitches, the missed turns, we have the opportunity to relax into shared space. In moments of extraordinary gathering, we recognize the transcendent in the ordinary.

Jai Joy,



And Written after Bhakti Fest.....

“I love you more than I can Tweet.”

I said these words backstage at Bhakti Fest to MoMo Loudiyi in moments of laughter and embraces, while thousands of people’s voices were raised in chant and musicians harmonized chords and progressions. In all of the ways that we express the multitude of flavors of love to each other throughout our days—through words and actions, through speaking and listening and eye contact and holding hands and sharing food—we have the opportunity to embody the gratitude that is inherent in this life, this breath, this community. The gratitude that is also part and parcel of this joy and this sorrow, the sun rising over and through the convoluted branches of the Joshua Trees in the high desert and the moon’s luminosity dancing among the stars in the midnight sky.

My quip has sparked an ongoing exchange, reminiscent of childhood challenges and whispered confessions of love more than we can speak, can say, love for which there are no words, love for which gestures even fall short. A Tweet, a Facebook posting, a text message, phone call, a letter, answering a plea for help from a friend whose back has given out, these only scratch the surface of how we express our love if we dare.
Whether we are living in the temporary magic of a festival like Bhakti Fest, or the far-from-ordinary alchemy of our everyday lives, each day and each breath is an opportunity to find more ways to share our love, to express it in every possible posture, even when it challenges us.

And for this, I am grateful.

This week's note from the LA YOGA email newsletter:

Yoga doesn’t necessarily take your problems away, nor does it even make things easier. Shiva Rea said something similar in one of her interviews in the new film Titans of Yoga. Yoga does provide us with an anchor, a mat, roots that help us connect into the earth and to our own inner silence, our own well that replenishes us and our ability to touch the infinite.

Because sometimes diving into the practice of Yoga can make life more intense as we uncover and recover, unwind and open up. And there are times when Yoga practice may make everyone around us more intense. So just think, my intensity meeting yours, well, then the excitement of it all can make us wonder why we practice in the first place.

In spite of (or sometimes because of) the practice, we can end up in the dark, weeping, confused, looking for the trailing rope of the life-raft that will secure us. In those moments we remember that life, our feelings, our tears, our joys, our accomplishments, our sorrows, are all ephemeral, temporary. Even our breath is more subtle than the wind and it is our life-long companion.

Life is a bit like walking a tightrope over quicksand filled with crocodiles (at least that’s how it feels to me sometimes). If anything, Yoga practice both added the crocodiles and the ability to negotiate the rope with a greater sense of ease, even amidst the impermanence and the shifting ground. Through the practice and philosophy of Yoga, I’ve learned to better accept it all. To look in the mirror and meet the gaze of my own eyes. And breathe, again and again.

It’s Yoga Month this month. At the close of the Q and A held after this week’s sold-out screening of the film Titans of Yoga (sold to raise money for the Yoga Recess project), we were challenged to find ten friends to introduce to Yoga. With free classes (scroll down for more information), free music downloads (also found here), there may be a few more enticements.

Just don’t tell them about the crocodiles.

This is my editor's note from the September issue of LA YOGA, that just hit the newsstands. I thought about it again tonight, after seeing the premiere of the film, Titans of Yoga, on the first day of Yoga Month, which featured some moments that made me smile, laugh and brought me to tears. And made me think, what's next? Although, it just occurred to me that more important than what's next is, really, what's now?


“What’s next?” one of my students asked after class recently. “I want more. I go to class regularly, but I can’t really spend more hours each day doing an asana practice.”
What’s next? It’s a good question and one that begs for an answer more thoughtful than “do more downward-facing dogs.”

Sometimes I ask myself another version of this same query, although mine is sometimes worded, “Have I done enough Yoga yet?” Have I sat through enough grueling hours of meditation, chasing thoughts and remembering mantras and fencing with distraction? Have I rolled out the mat enough times? Is there some cumulative effect from all those sun salutations, mornings churning my way through nauli, months of deciding that yes, I am going to be able to practice arm balances, no matter my particular body type. Have I read through enough texts, chanted the Mahamritunjaya Mantra with enough repetitions to matter? Is there some quality of “Just enough” that mirrors “What’s next?”

The answer is found in this moment, right here in this breath, in our wrestling match with despair, in our waltz with joy, in our playful duet with bliss in our exploration of the everyday that we repeat literally every day.

We can study philosophy, try to fit into just the right size jeans, we can query the nature of the universe. And all of these discourses, these mental and physical gymnastics merely lead us back to this moment and to considering the relationship we have with our body, mind, spirit, heart and our place in creation. The outer questions lead us to the inner question: Do we feel at home—in this life?

Yoga practice isn’t something that we can mark with notches carved into our headboard. There is never a next, neither is there enough. What is really next is to get over this idea of striving for more. After hours of practice, daily commitments, wondering what now, the answer is to stop, as Peter Russell suggests in the interview “Sitting Down With.” When we stop, the reasons for our practice are revealed. This very life is a relationship and each day we cultivate a more intimate connection with the divine and with our selves in all available forms.

So what’s next is not necessarily more practice, particularly since practice itself can sometimes be a trap, become a seduction. The reason we continue to practice, from our first breath until our last, is to cultivate the experience of being in relationship. We stop time when in the midst of our practice, when we are sweating our way through an intense vinyasa, turning our world upside down in an inversion or demonstrating our passion and compassion through a standing warrior pose.

To stop time, dive into the infinite space that is the cavernous expanse of your own heart. This is the treasure that is revealed to us. There is no map that takes us there; no X marks the spot, no matter how many teachers we may follow or books we may read.

While we can hope that we reach some milestone, threshold or place in our practice when we get to breathe a sigh of relief or call out with a loud shout celebrating that somehow we’ve made it somewhere, I doubt that’s how it happens. Even in the many stages of Samadhi before we enter the final absorption, there is an impermanence, a need to enter to doorway again and again.
This is practice, this is what’s next and this is why we’re never done.

So, I guess this means I’ll see you on the mat.

Life is easy. It can be far too easy for us to sit and berate ourselves for everything we haven’t done, for the emails we’ve missed, for the cobwebs grown around our “most important stuff” pile, for our misdeeds or for the times we’ve less than skillfully hurt someone, for the moments we haven’t followed through or the times we just missed “getting it right.”

It can be far too easy for us to slide on our commitments, to take the easy way out, to let our own vital energy slip from our bodies not unlike the way we suffer in our collective outer world with mishaps and mistakes.

What it is not so easy to do is to be accountable.

This week, I was reminded of the power of the practice of choosing and committing to maintaining a relationship with an accountability buddy. My Yoga sangha partner (we studied and sat for our comprehensive Yoga and Ayurveda exams together, years ago), Carrie Searles, in Denver, Colorado, revealed that she meets with her accountability buddy weekly. The two call each other out on promises kept and missed—without judgment or falling into the trap of fear and self-loathing. This inspired me so last night I made a commitment with my newly minted accountability buddy. We set our groundrules: a safe space, no judgment, we could speak about anything, we will speak weekly, our discussions would not go beyond our private space. And we will call each other out and enforce tapas (discipline)—holding our feet to the fire, as it were.

There’s a fine line sometimes between being held accountable and feeling guilty. We have to sweep out underneath the rugs of our lives—personally and collectively. But it does no one any good to do so with a leaden heart and pent-up anger. Our willingness to hold ourselves accountable takes hold best with an open heart.

Now, if we could only find a fierce accountability buddy for, oh, say BP and any number of other people and organizations.

This is my editor's note from this week's LA YOGA Magazine email newsletter:

It all comes down to relationship. This life, this adventure, this play (in Sanskrit, the leela—the divine play) that we take part in is a dance of relationship. Or at least that’s how I’ve been seeing it. Yesterday, that idea was the core focus of my teaching, my process of editing, even updating my Facebook page and considering the upcoming issues of LA YOGA Magazine.

The primary relationship we have in our lives is our relationship with our selves. This is the relationship that frames our life from our first breath to our last. The nature of this relationship sets the tone for all of the other relationships we engage in during this divine exploration of life.
Sometimes our relationship with the self is supportive, loving, kind; other times, it may be insidiously, subtly abusive, controlling, or angry. There is a danger that we neglect ourselves as our attention is drawn outside of ourselves, and this can have negative repercussions for our health and well-being at a profound level.

The relationship with the self is one that requires daily attention and daily cultivation. Just because we were kind yesterday and practiced ahimsa, nonviolence or compassion, the first of the yamas delineated in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras—today is a new day. And if we didn’t practice ahimsa—well, today is a new day. Today is a new opportunity to engage in the love affair with ourselves. Today is a new opportunity to examine our choices, to pause before we speak (out loud or within the echoing reverberation chamber of our own mind) and ask ourselves how our actions feed this divine relationship.

In Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, one of the oldest written texts, and an oft-quoted revered repository of Yogic wisdom, asana is described in sutra II-46. Sthira Sukham Asanam. I love this sutra, as so many of us who seek pithy Sanskrit phrases to elucidate the practice. There are many ways to translate this thread, as is the case for all Sanskrit words. (For example, we printed the 37 definitions of the word “Yoga” in the April, 2010, issue of LA YOGA.) My current favorite is: Find steadiness and sweetness in your seat, your posture, your pose, your shape. It’s been something that I’ve talked about in my classes all this week, including when I was teaching at Yogaglo and there was an earthquake during the class, which was the ultimate challenge of maintaining steadiness.

Sthira is steadiness and sukha is sweetness. People say that Sanskrit is a mantric language, and the sounds themselves hold the meaning of the word. I believe this to be the case with these two words. Shtira just feels steady, there’s a sense of steadiness that is held in the mouth as the word is formed and spoken. Sukha, well, it has the same root as the English words sucrose and sucanut, or more properly stated, the Sanksrit word holds the origin of the English. A lifetime of knowledge adds to the sound.

This is what we are seeking through the practice: steadiness and sweetness. It may come in a moment, in a breath, in the way we finally find that moment in downward facing dog when the pose fulfills the promise of being the resting pose it is rumored to be. In between the sweet breaths, there is plenty of bitterness, indeed. There is effort on the way to releasing effort. We wobble like Weebles on our way to finding a steady stance. Yet we are relaxing, surrendering, falling back into the warm embrace of sweetness.

There are statistics that the amount of sugar, particularly processed sugars, eaten by Americans is increasing exponentially. That’s not the type of sweetness I’m talking about here. Nor am I condoning the proliferation of artificial sweeteners that trick the body at a very deep level. I have a theory that part of the reason why there is this collective increase in sugar intake is because people are searching for sweetness; we’re longing for it. And we don’t always know how to find it. And with each news report, calamity, each day that oil still spills in the Gulf, with each earthquake, it becomes harder to find.

But Patanjali said, Sthira sukha asanam. There is a place we can go to find sweetness and it is within the practice, and most importantly, within us, if we dare to surrender.

Sthira Sukha Asanam.

If you want more Sthira Shukam Asanam, I'll be teaching one day of philosophy and meditation, Friday, July 16, in Palm Springs. Check out more details here.

FREEDOM
This was my editor's note from July 2, leading up to the holiday.

This weekend we celebrate freedom. We celebrate the legacy of independence, forward-thinking, rebellion, citizen activism, our collective individual rights, our ability to vote and speak our minds.

This is what this day means to us and what being born, growing up in or moving to this country at this period of time means. With this celebration, I believe we also have a responsibility to cultivate and to maintain these freedoms.

We can look at freedom at an individual level: Where are we imprisoned in our lives? Where are we stuck? Where are we holding ourselves back unnecessarily? What are the blind spots we’re not seeing? What are the obstacles we can break through? When we consider our individual freedoms, when we realize the truth, we know that we are already free. Freedom, liberation, enlightenment—these are our birthrights. This is what we are born to experience.

Living in this time and this place we are fortunate to be exposed to the teachings of Yoga and Ayurveda, in all of their paths, iterations, complexities, traditions—that offer us a template, a roadmap and an ability to discover and experience freedom. When we surrender and soften into ourselves, we know it, believe it, breathe it and embody it.

On Monday morning, July 5, we have the opportunity to go on this journey with Arun Deva (whom I recently had the pleasure of interviewing for the July issue teacher profile) exploring the Alchemy of Consciousness and the Transformative Power of Personal Practice at the Sivananda Center in Marina del Rey.

When we think about our larger freedoms, our ability to choose how we spend our money, what we purchase in order to enhance our health and well-being and our prerogative to support small farmers and ethical businesses, is also part of what it means to live here, in this country, at this time. I believe using our voices to maintain our freedoms is vital. This morning I read community member Tommy Rosen’s account of the recent FBI raid at the private food club Rawsome. (Read the account here.) Whether or not you believe in raw food, unpasteurized milk or the basic premises’ of this club, there are dangers in overregulation, in not allowing us to make choices, in the increased corporatization of our food supply, of factory farming and the dangers we are subjected to with lack of labeling around GMOs, proliferation of dangerous pesticides and other issues. At Rawsome, full disclosure is part of the deal. With true full disclosure, then we really have the freedom to choose. Freedom to choose is part of our independence. And this freedom to choose, I believe, should be more than just freedom to choose which brand of sugar-coated, GMO and pesticide-filled cereal in a box we buy.

If we believe the adage that practice, and all is coming, then do we dare to ask ourselves how are we practicing freedom in all areas of our life, on and off the mat, in and around our minds.
Happy Independence Day and to Freedom!

Has it really been a full year since I published a post on this blog? I've hardly been slacking, as an issue of LA YOGA Ayurveda and Health magazine comes out each month. And, starting at the end of 2009, we launced a weekly email newsletter, for which I write a short note. Those notes have their home only in the newsletter, and the represent whatever I'm thinking about at the time, so what better place to start publishing them but here, too!

I've also been busier since I've been teaching at class in the studio that is also filmed online at Yogaglo in Santa Monica, and I receive notes from people in LA and all over the world who are taking the classes.

There’s an endless soundtrack that runs through my mind…all of our minds. It’s the mental chatter of everyday life, the background music that sets the mood and tone of our days. I’ve been thinking about how often (I speak for myself) that chatter is critical, negative, second-guessing and full of resistance. It’s a practice to realize that nonviolence, and even more than nonviolence, the practice of compassion begins at the level of thoughts. After all, thoughts are something which accompany our every waking (and even sleeping) moment.

But it’s challenging and I admit that I notice myself slipping into critical thoughts nearly every other breath. I didn’t do it right, it wasn’t good enough, and so on (insert specific situation here). So the practice of shifting thoughts is one that requires activity. Criticism is easy, compassion, now that takes work.

This morning, I signed up on: http://itakethevow.com to make the commitment to practice nonviolence. It’s a practice that begins in my own home—and the most intimate part of my home—my head and body.

Pradipakshabhavana is a fancy Sanskrit term for this practice. It’s described by Patanjali in the classic text the Yoga Sutra as one of the key components of a yoga practice. Pradipakshabhavana is the art of cultivating the opposite thought when we are caught in or stuck in a negative groove. It’s a way of reframing, looking at thoughts or a discussion from a different light. This is far different than repressing, being in denial or looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. Pradipakshabhavana asks us to take a broader view. Yoga asks us to take the vow of nonviolence—and compassion—that begins with ourselves.

After all, our own mind, our own thoughts are the only ones we can control. If we work at it.

My comfort foods are spaghetti and chocolate milk. They have been for years. Not necessarily together, at the same meal. Especially not together since it would be a prajnaparada, a crime against Ayurvedic wisdom, since milk (the dairy variety) does not mix well with other things. They’re comfort foods because of the carbs and the subsequent serotonin effect, because they were both comfort foods for me growing up and have those pleasant childhood associations. And, in some ways, I suspect there’s a bit of the addictive allergy that may not be the best thing for me at play in my relationships with those two foods.

People often ask me about cravings: do we crave what will bring us into balance or do our cravings throw us further out of balance. The answer: It depends. It depends because it depends on our relationship with our ability to listen to ourselves, to our state of being in balance, to the nature of our body and mind’s innate intelligence.

So, when we’re truly craving something that is good for us, that we’re calling for from the depths of our being, and when we consume it, each cell in our body sings in a joyous symphony, well then, we’re craving something good for us, that is going to bring us back into balance, or keep us in balance in the first place. We can feel it, if we’re listening and being truly honest with ourselves.

On the other hand, if we’re craving something that merely makes us more out of balance as we already are, that exacerbates the condition of too much air, or too much fire or too much heaviness of earth, well, then that’s something to question, to stop and pause. To ask ourselves if we’re craving it out of mental habit, emotional desire or some convoluted need to ease some pain. Habit is a strong force, from an Ayurvedic perspective, and one which can pull us in directions we maybe shouldn’t go.

But then if we are craving something, we can look at what it is, and perhaps, what are some alternatives that could even be balancing. I’ve substituted chocolate almond milk today; it’s not as congesting or kaphagenic. I added freshly ground black pepper, fresh ginger root and some pine nuts to the pasta to heat up the wet and damp qualities of the wheat. And it’s been at least a couple months since I indulged in pasta, so for an experiment, I can check on how I feel. Tomorrow, it will be time to eschew the pasta for greens and not get caught up in the habit.

Today is a writing and editing day (after teaching morning Intention Yoga at lululemon) for me. Which means that part of the day involves work avoidance (my favorite pumpkin cookies at the Sojourner, turning down a movie but wandering into the Apple store and Borders with Shelia), and part of the day involves daydreaming and staring into space and part of the day involves searching for things on the internet like stainless steel rice cookers and vegetable steamers (since I’ve reconnected with my love of steamed rice but realized with dismay that my rice cooker is aluminum!). And, some of my day actually involves writing fueled by hot water and lemon accompanied by chocolate.

But chocolate and hot water are not enough to feed the muse and keep the fingers going on the keyboard. Searching for steamers became a perusal of recommendations on websites, the news of the day, changing the twitter background to green to support Iran and then the nodding of the eyelids. Writing, after all, is not really a mental gymnastic exercise. Like anything that we do, writing takes place in the body (even if we think otherwise). I began to get more done when I flung open the window, wider, to taste the breeze on my check. I walked out onto the balcony and shook the residual ash off of my Manduka mat to stretch out into a downward facing dog. I don’t write with my thoughts or even my fingers, I realized. I write with the extension of my left pinky toe.

When yoga teachers go of on what seem like tangential excursions into the placement of the right ring fingernail or the left tip of the shoulderblade or the protuberance of the right hip, it’s not because those obscure body parts have meaning, but because we need to do the pose with our whole body. Each piece is emblematic, symbolic and representative of the whole. And if we can bring our attention into what may seem like the dark cobwebbed corners of our body, then we are really doing yoga.

And when I am really doing yoga, I am writing. I’m in computer asana. But at the same time, I have a cup of steaming hot water sitting next to me, the fragrance of lemon peel stimulating my senses. I’ve oiled my feet and left them sans socks, wrapped in a cotton flannel sheet to feel both the grounded energy of the Earth element (kapha in Sanskrit Ayurvedic terminology). When I can become embodied then the words are there, existing in the alchemical play of the elemental forces I drink in through the open window.

I often spray it on my pillow at night; I keep a bottle of the essential oil in my car for the anti-road rage emergencies. I use it to cool and calm my often irritated skin.

The other day, I bent over, forgetting that the mug of just-out-of-the-teapot water was in my hand and it spilled over onto the joint around my thumb. It was the instant burning sensation that made me aware of my inattention. First I rinsed with cold water to take away the worst of the burn. Next, it was a dousing with the ever-present lavender oil by my side. It was the lavender oil that really changed things. After a few minutes, I could no longer feel the heat, even though the skin was still tinged pink. But the throbbing had stopped, the burning sensation ceased. Now, three days later, there is still a pink tinge, but no pain, no tightness around the skin, and it’s rapidly healing.

I know that there are a number of remedies for burns. Freshly picked aloe applied to the burn site as soon as possible is a good one. Without an aloe plant, aloe juice or gel is also a good remedy in the moment as well as after the fact on an ongoing basis to help the skin heal. The other day, I received a not on my Facebook page that another remedy for burns is to mix agnihotra ash (from the sacred agnihotra fire ceremony) with ghee to apply to a burn. All good ideas.

We need darkness as much as we need light. It’s a funny thing to think about isn’t it? Because sometimes we focus on sunlight, the hours of light in the day, yearning for the sun when it’s cloudy or grey. We read in bed, watch TV to fall asleep, get used to the glow of the computer. But the darkness, the absence of light, the black that surrounds us to the point where we can bathe in it and feel comforted by it, it’s a necessary part of our daily rhythms.

Our body (specifically our pineal gland, perched deep within the base of our brain) produces melatonin, one of the hormones important in our sleep cycles, in the presence of darkness. Not in the presence of light, but in the presence of darkness. This is why turning off the lights, bathing ourselves in darkness is crucial to our health. This is why spending time in a dark room to fall asleep, or even standing outside in the darkness is part of the ritual action necessary to help us sleep.'

Blanketing ourselves in darkness. Try it for deeper sleep.

We sometimes forget that there is one relationship that we will have our whole lives, and that’s our relationship with ourselves. It extends from our first breath to our last and no other relationship we have lasts as long. Not our parents. Although as I write this, both my parents are thankfully alive so they’re currently matching me in terms of that relationship. Not our children (while I don’t have any at the moment), because we have a life before they do. Not siblings, or partners, or friends or pets. My sister is four years younger than I, and although she is in my heart and frequently in my thoughts, it is my own breath that I hear, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. And on it goes.

And when we think about the relationship we have with ourselves, how do we treat ourselves in that relationship. Is it functional, dysfunctional, abusive, difficult, happy, unhappy? What do we do to cultivate it, to keep it going, to make it memorable, enjoyable, delightful. How do we honor ourselves, take care of ourselves? Are we creating a relationship that we want to be in, that we long to come home to? Are we creating a relationship that is home, for our body is what we inhabit always, all of the time?

When I frame things in this way, thinking about the relationship I have with myself, it makes me stop and pause more frequently. Am I talking to myself in a way that I would talk to someone else that I cared about? In a way that I would want a loved one to talk to me? Am I serving a meal that I would be proud to offer? Am I inviting a level of love and care and fortitude and gratitude? Am I the lover and the beloved?

Tonight I served myself a meal that I would be proud to serve to another: beets, fennel and leeks sautéed in olive oil and rosemary. Salad with sunflower sprouts and farmers market lettuce and radishes and crushed pepper and olive oil. I was cooking and preparing for only myself, knowing that there was no one more important than I to share this meal. And if there had been another, the reverence I had for them would have been a reflection from the mirror of my own self-love.

basketball stadium. Everywhere you looked, there were scarves tied loosely, draped over shoulders, wrapped and looped and folded. Pink, purple, black, white, brown, blue, green, patterned and plain. I was doing my part to represent by wearing three scarves: different shades of purple and pink, layered.

From the perspective of Ayurveda, scarves are a great way to calm vata, the elements of air and ether or empty space. When we are exposed to the cold, the wind, the air, the air within us blows even more. One of the ways to keep the winds that stir up too much calmed down and in a pattern is to warm, contain, soothe and nurture. Wrapping a scarf around ourselves contains what could be a potential hurricane when the winds pick up.

Packing a scarf is one of the most important things I do as I get ready to go on a trip. On an airplane, in a car, riding a boat or pedaling a bicycle, a scarf is one of the most important items of clothing I can wear. It keeps me from feeling cold in shifting temperatures and climates, breathing the canned air of a plane or cutting through the windy air on a bike. It keeps my core temperature warmer; it even makes me feel more grounded. For a group of people coming from the high windy steppes of Tibet, what better gift is there than a scarf?

Waking up and going to sleep are the in-between times, the times when our malleable consciousness has the opportunity to shift and change and adjust. What we think and repeat and process and do in these moments can set up the tone of our day, or even reprogram our mind and our state of being.

I love the early morning hours before dawn, before sunrise, when quiet envelopes the earth, when quiet is like a soothing blanket. This is the time when there is the promise of renewal, new beginnings. These are the hours of vata in the Ayurvedic system, of emptiness and movement, of potentiality and possibility. If we can take the opportunity to set the tone of the day in these moments, we can build a momentum that sees us through the day. We can fill ourselves with the joy, the love, the peace, the birdsong, the vibration of the universe and the intention and that is what we can wake up with, that is what we can walk with when we set our feet on the earth.

As I write this, the sky is slowly becoming brighter. I hear the harmony of chirping that is a sound more profound and more delightful than any alarm clock. To accompany this, lately I’ve been chanting, either out loud, or in my mind each morning when I wake up. It is a great gift, this life, and how we begin each day every day prepares us for our ability to give our greatest gifts and receive our greatest love.

I find myself craving silence. Not just a moment of silence or the thought of silence or some time when I’m not talking, but the kind of silence that I can wrap myself in like a blanket. It’s the kind of silence that doesn’t involve going to a yoga class in a studio where a teacher provides instruction or there’s music or there’s people wanting to say hello before or after class. I’m looking for the kind of silence uninterrupted by music, even instrumental, or the television. Silence. I do, though, welcome the sounds of the birds outside my open window. And the birds remind me a bit of the whispers of my breath, the wind through the trees, the far off sounds of cars that are inescapable in my current habitat but blend in. The far-off foghorn, that’s okay too.

It’s not that I’m antisocial. Far from it, in fact. My morning started today with cutting and pasting and editing class descriptions and teacher profiles for the New Living Expo, this month in San Francisco and then moved on to my regular class at the Montecito YMCA complete with goofiness, made-up words (think unstiffify yourself) and admonitions to get juicy in the joints. Next up, board of directors’ conference call, the California Association of Ayurvedic Medicine (CAAM). It reminds me a bit of episodes of Pinky and the Brain my ex-boyfriend loved to watch, and I got hooked on by proxy: “Brain, what are we going to do today?” “Take over the world.” So CAAM’s purpose in life is to take over the world and spread the message of the healing power of Ayurveda. Nearly an hour and a half of concoctions before I’m off to see Sri Karunamayi chant and sing to remove our obstacles and honor our divine nature and then talk about the need for laughter (and we laughed), turning the tide of negativity, finding that part of ourselves that is divine and then blessings and lunch with friends old and new. Hours and hours of social time.

Now, all I want is silence. It’s rejuvenating, regenerating, restorative. Our words have power, so when we take a moment to hold them in, the charge builds. Silence allows us to digest. And digestion, according to Ayurveda, is the essence, the root of our health and well-being. All day long we absorb and take in sensory impressions, through our mouth, our eyes, our ears, our skin. It nearly never ends. Everything we take in, in every moment, becomes part of us, part and parcel of our cellular makeup, our mind and our body and our very being. Without taking the time to pause, we get indigestion. It’s just like if we ate constantly, never stopping the motion of tasting, chewing and swallowing. When would we process?

So those moments, minutes, hours of silence when awake are precious, to be treasured, enjoyed, savored. It’s part of what makes us healthy. It’s the yin to the yang of activity and socializing.

Now, back to the birds and the breath.

We often perpetuate patterns that we repeat without intent or consent. We tend to mimic behavior that has been modeled for us, thinking that it is normal. Whether or not our behaviors or patterns or choices, conscious or unconscious, actually make our lives better, is another consideration entirely.

And it’s one I’ve been thinking about lately as I examine my work patterns. I’ve fallen into a bit of a trap of complain, suffer, get exhausted, repeat. Before I something allowed me to stop and consider, I don’t think I realized that I had gotten on this particular express train. I didn’t wake up thinking, “Oh, I’m going to complain as much as possible, make myself as miserable as possible and then wear myself out to the point of exhaustion.”

So, now I’m trying to rethink this pattern, to notice when I get caught up in it, to make sure I take the time to stop and practice and check my reactivity and my assumptions. And to ask, am I doing enough to nurture myself, take care of myself and slow down. And am I doing things that I find fun? Am I spending enough time alone to recharge? Am I doing things to actually make my life easier instead of make it more difficult? All good questions to ask. Always good to question. Without questioning, we only repeat patterns. When we stop, when we pause, when we question, we can actually change patterns.

Speaking of which, I’m committing to getting back in the pattern of regular blog entries!

I love winter sunsets. There’s something about how low the sun is in the sky. There’s something about that sweet moment when gold bathes the treetops and sends it’s brilliant hue across the leaves. In this moment, gazing out over the sky, the trees, the sky beneath the clouds, that I feel that no matter what has happened today, there is something beautiful about this life. Amidst all of my frustrations, difficulties, pettiness, challenge, unhappiness, wishing things were different, the setting sun and the light it shoots out uplifts my heart. I feel lighter, more joyous.
I have to remember that life is all of these things: it is the challenge, it is the despair, it is the agony, the fear. Every time we want it to be easy, every time we want things to fall in our laps, every time we want the solution to appear before us, we have to remember the glory, the joy of solving the problems, of crossing the finish line, of training and sweating and struggling.
I’m reminded of the fact that bone density, whether we’re considering building or maintaining, is triggered by the stress applied to the bone by the surrounding musculature. Bones only grow, they’re only strong, when we place some mechanical stress upon them. It’s not unlike the lives we lead. We need the adventure, the drama, the difficulty. And sometimes, when it’s missing, we create it and manufacture it.
We may get caught up in things that seem to be of dire importance, life or death decisions, even if they’re not. When they’re not easy, when someone makes a comment that rankles, when we argue or stick to our guns or question our decisions, we may question, waffle, wonder, struggle. But it’s all important. It is.
And then, watching the sun set, I feel like I’ve made the right decisions. Even the ones I’ve bungled terribly. And I feel oh-so-very-lucky to have this day.

The easy part is making New Year’s Resolutions. The easy part is drafting a list, setting goals, coming up with plans and wishes and desires and creating intentions. The more challenging part is the day to day transforming intentions into actions.
Manifesting New Year’s Resolutions and making them part of our daily routine, our very breath and our embodied experience of who we are is the real practice. This is the tapas, the fire of our discipline. It is in the fire that our practice is forged, and who we are as a person is shaped and formed. Just like building a fire and keeping it going, the practice of integrating resolutions in our everyday life takes attention and awareness. Transmuting a New Year’s Resolution into a habit involves daily decisions where we choose to take a specific action. We tend to live our lives in familiar grooves, from pattern to pattern like continually driving a car down a muddy dirt road. When the tire tracks create deep grooves in the road, it is easy to drive down those same paired grooves. It takes more effort to drive the car along another path. This is what it is like when we try and create new habits and incorporate them into our lives. We have to gently coax our steering wheel, our tires, onto another track. We have to peer at the map and set a different route than the one that may have been chosen automatically by the GPS. But with enough repetitions of the new pattern, it becomes ensconced in our bodies. With enough time, the new becomes familiar. People say it takes anywhere from 28 to 40 days to create a new habit and for that habit to become part of our bodies, part of the routine of our everyday lives. Embodied thought.
I thought about this while gazing in the bathroom mirror this morning. One of my New Year’s Resolutions this year is to floss my teeth, one of the repeated recommendations of my dentist that I diligently repeat for a while before the intention falls away. It’s time to recommit and to remind myself that the implementation of this resolution comes in the daily decisions, in deciding to pick the dental floss up off of the counter and actually use it. Every day. Every day it’s a new decision, and that new decision creates a new habit. Soon, the resolution is part of our everyday lives, integrated as fully as the breath, practice made personal.