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One of the things I’ve learned in almost 40 years of near-daily yoga practice and teaching is that all the fancy poses at the end of the book, all the gymnastic and pretzel poses, are present from the outset, hidden inside the basic “beginner” poses.
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And this happened years before the mighty tangerine took up space in the oval office.
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On January 26, 2001 a huge earthquake struck Gujarat in western India, killing over 20,000 people and destroying tens of thousands of homes. In response BKS Iyengar sent 15 of his teachers to stricken villages there to offer free yoga to the survivors. The teachers took with them a sequence of poses devised by Iyengar especially for victims of catastrophes such as earthquakes and hurricanes. (I hope such a sequence is being offered freely in Texas and Florida right now – and, sadly, in many another place around this widely-suffering world.)
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Ranging out to the edges, returning home. Finding the periphery, finding the center. Rhythm, in time and in space.
Here’s the poet Robert Hass talking about rhythm: “Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.” Too much security and we feel suffocated, too much variation and we feel unmoored and lost. Hass is talking pretty much just about the effects of rhythm in poetry, but we can broaden our thinking to encompass yoga.
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Once upon a time in the west I had a yoga teacher. The three things he said most over the years were:
“Why you rushing?”
“Well, what are you going to do about that?”
“These things take time.”
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Remember the game you used to play as a kid: Go to the beach with your family, make a bonfire. Then, picking a moment when your mom isn’t looking, wave your hand through the flames – fast at first so you won’t get singed – but then the game and challenge is to see how slowly you can do it, and still not get burnt.
And what you learn really quickly is that even the slowest wave still has to be pretty fast.
It’s a fun kid game, I hope you all did it, but as a way of practicing yoga, it seems to me not so useful.
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One of the finest basket-weaving traditions in the world exists - partly - right here in Sonoma County: baskets woven by members, almost always women, of the Pomo tribe. There are Pomo baskets held by many private collectors and in museums around the world.
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We’re going to let the poets take the first steps on this thousand-mile journey.
Many riches are hidden deep in the sea. But if you want to play it safe, stay on the shore.
---Shaadi of Shiraz
A Way Comes Into Being By Our Walking Upon It.
---Chuang Tzu
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Hatha yoga, as an historical offshoot of tantra, is concerned with the cultivation and uses of the body’s inner energy or power to transform the ego-personality of the practitioner in this lifetime. Hatha yoga wants you to change your mind – in fact, your body/heart-mind/spirit – from a condition of self-delusion and ignorant isolation to a state of cosmic understanding and participation.
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In 1969 the poet Gary Snyder wrote and published - for free distribution - a short prose-poem called “Smokey the Bear Sutra” which I’ve included below. In this poem Snyder’s main metaphor is of raging forest-fires of greed and war, oppression and destruction all being put out by Smokey the Bear, an incarnation of the Great Sun Buddha.
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One of the goals of any authentic yoga practice is to connect the latent intelligence of the body with its vitalizing energy. How can we use our asana and pranayama practice to disclose and nourish this hidden connection?
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Marlon Brando’s famous line from “On the Waterfront”. His older brother had talked him into taking the fall in a series of boxing matches in order to collect gambling winnings…rigging the fights to make some dough.
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When you imagine you’ve found your inner guru in your own bosom, you might want to pause and reflect. Don’t get too excited; don’t get too carried away, as they say. Consider that your inner guide might, just might, be delusional.
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But wait: “Yoga is the stilling of the actions of the mind.” “When the body, the breath and the mind come together in the present moment, that is yoga.”
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What is needed now is not any kind of spacing out or trance, any kind of sedation no matter how pleasant. No wishful thinking or lotus-eating oblivion ever was helpful. Rather, eyes-wide-open focus, determination, patience, compassion, and cultivation of a stronger life-force, a deep inner vitality, are what are required today.
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But his basic thesis is plain: to practice yoga is to practice un-natural, even anti-natural acts…self-expression, so-called, plays no part in yoga. At least not the passing, impulsive, skin-deep, most readily-encountered self we call our personality. Beneath that, or beyond that, there is Something or Somebody that any real yoga practice is always pointing at and urging us toward.
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For a couple of years when I was young I worked on the San Francisco docks as a longshoreman, loading and off-loading cargo from freighters. This was before the days of container-ships, so you’d actually climb down into the ship’s hold to man-handle the crates and drums. I’d already done different kinds of manual labor – digging ditches, hauling lumber, that kind of thing.
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The everyday, stubborn, meaty reality of the poses and the breath roots us, tethers us, against any flights of fancy we might be tempted toward, any pie-in-the-sky grandiosity or blaming the other. Either you can balance on your head in headstand, or you can’t and you fall on the floor. There’s really no arguing about it, it’s not a matter of opinion.
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