On Action
I claim the title of a New Yorker Yogi for many reasons. One, because of its literal physical meaning - I am a practitioner of yoga from NYC. But I also claim the title because it is my job to attain liberation, in the present, in the day. Perhaps that is why I am so drawn to the Jivamukti style, “jivamukti” meaning “liberation while living,” a style of yoga developed and curated in New York. The foundation of yoga in India has been regarded as the renunciation of action in this lifetime in order to stop the cycle of reincarnation. In this school of thought, everything is for the next life, a preparation for the future. This is a great foundation and many lessons can be learned from this, but that is not why I practice yoga.
Liberation while living means staying in the day without projecting into tomorrow or being paralyzed by the past. This concept of one day at a time means staying present with what is best for us at the moment, not with what we think will be best for us tomorrow because we don’t really know anything about tomorrow. No, this is not an excuse to relinquish self-care - it is a closer look at what it means to take care of ourselves.
I will offer an example: One day last week, I had plans to go to a yoga class and then a party. As I walked in the pouring rain to Union Square, I played the chitta vritti tape in my head of, “But I have this early appointment tomorrow…and I want to wake up at xyz time and I’m scared of being tired, etc, etc, etc.” I got so into tomorrow that I left the day on the 5 train home. And you know what? I ended up regretting it. And I stayed up at home just as late as I would have stayed up if I went to the party.
For years, doing nothing used to be a tremendous comfort for me. Zoning out in front of the TV watching Gilmore Girls was my dated version of bliss. Yoga deeply changed that. I have discovered a productive way of zoning out that allows me to be in life rather than in front of a television (there’s totally nothing at all wrong with TV, btw).
In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says, “discipline in action surpasses renunciation of action.” That is a true yogic lesson to stay in the day, go to the class, join in the party of life, and know that home will always be there for me to return to.
YOGA FLASH MOB!
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After college, some people go to grad school. Others spend their summer pondering their reason for existing on this planet. And some…start a yoga nonprofit dedicated to providing free yoga in NYC.
This nonprofit is called Storm Yoga and (pun totally intended) it will take the city by storm with a savasana yoga flash mob on Wednesday, August 24th in Grand Central. And when asked why they’re doing a yoga flash mob, an answer can’t get better than this -
This convergence is a joyful, creative, edgy expression of love, a salute to the explosive kernel of potential within all of us, a bold display of an emerging consciousness that’s built upon focus, presence, and boundless energy.
RSVP to the Facebook event here!
Dharma Talk Tuesdays
Yoga, Slam Poetry, & Activism
Where I go to school, slam poetry is the new football. At the start of every slam, the MC will remind the audience, “The point is not the point. The point is the poetry!” This is true for yoga as well…but we’ll use different terms to coin our metaphor. In yoga, the point is not the pose; the point is what that pose can do for you, how it can allow you to carry yourself off the mat and into the world. If the pose exists exclusively on the mat, it does not matter. At all. “But it gets me a tight ass,” I hear the whines. Okay, maybe those sri namaskars are working your toosh, but what exactly are you going to do with that tight ass? Where is it going to go? What meaning can you cultivate for yourself on the mat that you can take out into the world? We are Generation Change. This is evidenced by Obama’s 2008 campaign slogan and by the rekindling of restlessness on college campuses. On my dorm room wall, I have the quote, “We don’t do slactivism.” To keep your yoga on the mat, condensed into the limitations and exclusivity of asana is to do slactivism. To take that composure, grace, desire to be of service, intention, and attention into the world is to do activism.
Start Something That Matters is so on my reading list. What is piercingly clear in the message of the creator of my beloved Tom’s shoes is that passions transfer across disciplines. What does this mean exactly? It doesn’t really matter what you love; it simply matters that you love. And it is that shared concept of love, of passion, of wanting to do something worthwhile that is the intention - the driving force - behind how we lead our lives and take actions of service. Oh, and why is this video on this blog? DHARMA, people! Purpose! This is one of those gems that might not seem yogic on the surface, but the message is so, so one of deep yoga.
i did not know what to make of occupy wall street when i first heard about it. a native new yorker, my first thoughts went to the residents of wall street, people whose daily lives would be interrupted by college students just like me, protesting. however, i have always loved (and romanticized) protests. it is amazing and dynamic to have a feeling, translating that feeling to heated passion, and then coming together to actually do something about about that feeling.
this physical manifestation of a communal energy is what yoga is all about. my skepticism left once i realized that yogis were headed to wall street as peaceful warriors. call me crazy, but yogis are the most sensible people i know and the fact that wall street can be used as a yoga studio is pretty inspiring.
I am on the plane to Seattle and finishing Blake Mycoskie’s amazing book Start Something that Matters. I have been wearing TOMS shoes for two years now and go through pairs rapidly as tends to be pattern with shoes (I have New Yorker feet – I walk hard on pavement and usually wear the same pair until they deteriorate).
I found out about this book via yogapreneur (oh, hay, I can’t believe I just made up that title) Kimberly Wilson’s blog and it’s been on my Shelfari for a few months now. Finally, I ordered it on Kindle for iPhone and have been so hooked. Like, I haven’t been this hooked on a book since I finished the vampire-novel-for-academics-and-yogis A Discovery of Witches. And that was fiction!
But the TOMS story may as well be fiction for how gripping it is. It is all about giving. It is inspiring and awesome and preaching to my heart right now.
On Thursday, I went to hear and meet Donna Karan at the 92nd St Y (where I first started my yoga practice, by the way). I went backstage to meet this terrific woman, who started the Urban Zen Foundation (post to come!) and intended to just put my name out there for a summer internship. But, when I told her I was a yoga teacher, she basically screamed, “Then you should teach with us in Haiti!”
It sounded so right, to teach yoga in Haiti, and it was something I didn’t think of before. You see, I have to make money this summer because college + further yoga teacher trainings = muy expensivo, and this winter break, I have been getting a bit disheartened by feeling like I have to choose money over giving. There are so many organizations I would love to volunteer for, but they just don’t pay.
Mycoskie, with the beloved TOMS shoes, views this as a core issue with a pivotal solution that our society faces today. We should not have to wait until we make enough money to be able to give back. We should be able to give and get in tandem. This is certainly how I view my yoga practice and yoga teaching. I practice to teach and teach because I practice. I want to get to give and to give because I get.
TOMS does this – and, side note, I want to put out into the universe that I would love to teach yoga at the TOMS headquarters for that staff one day – by combining philanthropy and business and making those two components interdependent. It’s sheer brilliance. I am in love with these ideas.
The final chapter got me thinking about the times when I played a part in giving in a group, in giving purely, and in giving with so much freaking joy.
It was during my yoga teacher training. The women and man in that training still teach me what it means to show up for my peers with an open heart and through pooling everyone’s limited resources, in order to create an abundance of resources.
Pat teaches elementary school kids and provided yoga instruction during recess…outside, in the yard. Major issue: these kids were basically practicing on concrete because they didn’t have mats. So, an email went out asking if any of us had extra mats. We were training to be yoga teachers, for Goddess’s sake - of course we had extra mats! So, that weekend, we came early, brought the mats, blasted music, and, when Pat entered, presented them to her one by one. The process was so simple, so easy, didn’t cost us anything, but the rewarding look of surprise on Pat’s face was worth a million.
We did something like this again at the end of the training. The Yoga Collective was brand new. We had a huge book list of recommended reading and five required texts for the training. Books are expensive, especially yoga books, so we circulated the titles between us, but it wasn’t easy for us all to get our reading done on time because of the limited resources. Then, Laine had an idea: to create a surprise lending library for the director. So, people donated what they were comfortable donating and Laine ordered the books on Amazon. Now, when I teach at the Collective, I can just pull a book off the shelf for the dharma talk and future trainees don’t have to worry about scraping together the funds for their book list.
What strikes me about these personal examples and the examples Mycoskie provides is that they are simple, don’t involve a lot of effort, bring tremendous sustainable rewards, and can be done anywhere, anytime, by anyone with any amount of resources.
So maybe I will teach yoga in Haiti this summer. Maybe I’ll have an internship where I can find more creative and less obvious ways of giving. Who knows? But what Start Something that Matters gives me is confidence of happy progress into a future of giving.
To finish this post off, I will leave you with a quote from that last chapter:
“You owe it to the world to act.”
Seane Corn Demonstrates “Body Prayer”
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
For Seane Corn, yoga is much more than a practice in flexibility. It’s a way of applying spiritual lessons to real-world problems and personal issues. One way she channels her energy and love is through a practice she calls “body prayer,” as she shares in this video from Yoga from the Heart.
She shared this perspective about “body prayer” with Krista Tippett in our show, “Yoga, Meditation in Action”:
“I trust that if I do my yoga practice, I’m going to get stronger and more flexible. If I stay in alignment, if I don’t push, if I don’t force, then my body will organically open in time. I know that if I breathe deeply, I’ll oxygenate my body. It has an influence on my nervous system. These things are fixed and I know to be true.
But I also recognize that it’s a mystical practice, and you can use your body as an expression of your devotion. So the way that you place your hands, the ways that you step a foot forward or back, everything is done as an offering. I offer the movements to someone I love or to the healing of the planet. And so if I’m moving from a state of love and my heart is open to that connection between myself and another person or myself and the universe, it becomes an active form of prayer, of meditation, of grace.
And when you’re offering your practice as a gift, as I was in that particular DVD, as I do often, I was offering to my dad who’s very ill. And so when I have an intention behind what I’m doing, then it becomes so fluid. Because if I fall out of a pose I’m not going to swear, I’m not going to get disappointed or frustrated. I’m going to realize that this is my offering, and I don’t want to offer that energy to my father. I only want to offer him my love. And so I let my body reflect that. And when you link the body with the breath, when my focus is solely on getting the pose to embrace the breath that I’m actualizing, then the practice, it’s almost in slow motion.
It has a sense of effortlessness. When people can connect to that, it takes the pressure off of trying to do it perfectly. It just becomes a real expression of their own heart. Sometimes it’s graceful and elegant, other times it’s kind of funky and abstract, but it’s authentic to who the person is. It’s their own poetry.”
, as she shares in this video from Yoga from the Heart, is through the practice of she demonstrates the graceful and athletic movements that channel energy and love to a person or culture.
today, i hung out with my awesome friend who is working for this amazing organization. they have great videos and talk about the very yogic concept of sustainability and satya, truth, in honesty about what we are consuming. check it out!
WTF am I doing this summer?!
This is a question I have been asked a lot recently (okay, maybe without the expletives)…and it is a hard one to answer.
This summer, I am in San Francisco and how I got here is a huge part of my story as a college yogi.
Like most college students in March, I was addicted to Google, Idealist, my school’s student internship database, and anything that held some kind of promise of finding me fulfilling work for the summer. I applied for countless internships and jobs - ones that I thought I had a good chance of getting - and I applied for one grant from my school, one that I did not think I would ever get (I applied because the application actually looked fun to write - it asked you to design your dream summer).
As life would have it, every job I thought I might get either wait-listed me or never acknowledged that I applied in the first place. I began to lose hope until one day, as I walked from tutoring my awesome middle schoolers to a cafe to meet my incredibly inspiring friend, I just thought…FUCK THAT.
My dream summer involved me going to San Francisco, exploring a new city, living independently, writing a book on yoga for college students, and teaching yoga. My big FUCK THAT was to any limitations that might come my way. So I sat with my dear friend J, wrote this dream summer out, and decided I was going to be a “vagabond yogi,” getting on every single sub list I could find just to make end’s meet and live out a dream.
Feeling refreshed and inspired with this new challenge, I left the cafe and headed over to my Modern American Poetry class. I sat down, opened up my computer, and received an email from my school with a subject line of “CONGRATULATIONS.”
The second I let go of wanting or needing that grant in the first place, I got it. I released all expectations, practiced faith, and my FUCK THAT became a FUCK YEAH. I found a room to sublet thanks to my friend from teacher training, found an internship with college yogi friend and fellow teacher, L, and booked a flight to SF. A few months later, and here is a jumbled and incredibly exciting and super hard to explain list of what I am doing this summer:
- Interning at Mandala, a yoga publishing company.
- Teaching yoga to the staff at the Family Health Center.
- Holding babies at mom and baby yoga at Yoga Tree.
- Being a karma yogi at Laughing Lotus (cleaning in exchange for unlimited yoga).
- Taking lots and lots of classes at the Lotus.
- Writing an eBook on yoga for college students, entitled Yoga U (stay tuned for plenty of updates).
- Volunteering at Wanderlust, the yoga and music festival, in Tahoe next week.
- Hanging out with and getting thoroughly inspired by friends who are doing awesome, dharma-fulfilling things.
- Hiking, walking, meditating, being.
- FIND A PARTNER-IN-CRIME: This would be my college yoga teacher friend, L. We work so freaking well together and know what it means to take a yoga break during long days of interning and desk work. I asked for help when I needed to find a structured internship for the grant and then came this great opportunity.
- CAREGIVERS NEED CARE: I am learning what it means to teach beginners and people who care for others all day long and come on Mondays to take care of themselves. For one hour a week, I am taking care of the people whose job it is to take care.
- BABIES = BLISS: Read more about that here.
- THERE IS A WAY: I wanted a yoga community and a set place to go and practice from wonderful teachers, but I did not have the money so I marched up to the front desk and asked for a way. Sometimes, all we have to do is ask.
- GET BOSSED AROUND: During the school year, I often do my own practice or practice the class I am about to teach, but sometimes, we just need someone to tell us what to freaking do. This is the beauty of a teacher, of showing up to yoga class.
- HAVE A PROJECT: I need to have a project. It allows me to feel fulfilled, connected to my dharma, and see the interlacing of all my interests. It is a magical process.
- DON’T PAY; HELP: I wanted to experience Wanderlust, but couldn’t afford the tickets and honestly, it’s better that way because now I get to have a sense of purpose that is more than just about me. I get to earn my yoga day with my time.
- TAKE TIME: It takes time to build friendships and they make the world go round because they offer us the opportunity to learn from our peers.
- WE ARE HUMAN BEINGS, NOT HUMAN DOINGS: We can only “do” if we allow ourselves heaps of time to “be.” This was told to me by a very wise yoga teacher and this summer, I am trying to put it into practice (I’m a New Yorker transplanted into the West Coast - it doesn’t always come naturally).
Last summer, all I wanted was to have a “yoga summer,” one where I woke up and flowed into a downward-facing dog, learned about philosophy and anatomy, and have the freedom to pursue what I loved full time. The world does not always work that way and yoga certainly does not. I had to make money to finance my teacher training so I wound up working as a personal assistant to three different people during the weekdays and I did 200 hours of teacher training at night and on the weekends. The Rolling Stones have it totally right:
You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.
I got what I needed because I got plenty of challenging situations to put yoga into practice. To practice yoga on the mat is easy, but to put what we learn on the mat into the rest of our lives, into practice - now, that’s the hard work.
This summer, I have that yoga summer I dreamed of and I would not have it now if I did it a year ago. We get the lessons we need when we need them.
