perspective – Page 3 – Yoga 4 Healthful Living

Avoiding Autumn’s Adversities

Elizabeth Advice, Knowledge, Seasons September 21, 2015February 5, 2021fall, perspective, seasons, yoga sutra

The Yoga Sutra (YS II.16) teaches that we should “avoid future suffering.” This means not only letting go of behaviors, attitudes or habits that cause us pain, but also looking ahead and preparing for difficulties that may arise so they can be avoided. This Sutra applies to our environment and its seasonal changes as well. They require our attention, so we can prepare and mitigate any adverse effects to come. After all, if we heard that a blizzard was coming, we would go to the store to buy our milk, eggs, and bread, and possibly batteries. We would make sure there was gas in the snowblower, we had trusty shovel, and maybe a little extra food for the birds.

I love autumn. The days may be warm, but the nights feel cool and clear. Mums, and pumpkins, and apples appear everywhere. And, we know that soon leaves will explode in dazzling reds, oranges, and yellow.

But some of the qualities of fall that we tend to overlook can cause problems. Think of the leaves we see fading. Their tips curl as they become drier and drier, even as many color magnificently. The leaves of most deciduous trees will fall to the ground, dry and crunchy as we walk in them. The air moves, as winds sweep the dried leaves, and the days begin to cool.

Ayurveda – the ancient Indian holistic medical system – tells us fall is the season when vata dosha is dominant. The word dosha means “a fault or mistake,” and vata means “to blow or move like the wind.” Vata is one of three doshas, the others being pitta and kapha, that are components of all life.

Throughout the year, each of the three doshas becomes dominant in different seasons. When vata dosha is dominant in fall, it can lead to an imbalance of that dosha within us. And, if we are in our wisdom years, we become more vulnerable to an imbalance of our vata dosha.

Some of the symptoms we might experience when vata is out of balance include: difficulty sitting still, racing thoughts. unfocused mind, difficulty sleeping, dryness of the skin, hair, or nails, constipation, forgetfulness, or anxiety. Our joints might feel creaky, as if they needed lubrication.

We may experience a vata dosha imbalance in seasons other than fall, depending upon our own constitution (the mix of the three doshas we are born with) and our diet, lifestyle, and life situation. But just to emphasize – the qualities of fall make us more vulnerable to a vata imbalance.

An ayurvedic practitioner can help us understand our own unique constitution and recommend dietary and lifestyle changes to help us achieve or maintain balance. Our yoga practice can help us mitigate the suffering that a vata inbalance can cause for our bodies, energy, mind, and emotions as we work to create a sense of groundness. We can use breathwork to calm our breath and mind; we can include a meditative practice to focus the mind. While we regularly use these tools in yoga, it is the intention of our practice that is most important. Bringing a calm, quiet, meditative intention to our yoga practice can help us maintain balance so we can welcome rather than suffer from the autumn days.

Let fall be a time to nourish yourself with your yoga and enjoy the season, and please let me know if you would like to work with me to develop your personal yoga practice for the fall.

Life Situation or Life

Elizabeth Advice, Knowledge August 17, 2015February 5, 2021discipline, perspective, philosophy, yoga sutra

A friend of mine shared a wonderful insight that has come to mind again and again over the summer. My friend’s insightful words center around a distinction he made between our “life situation” and our “life.”

Our “life situation” is just that – the situation(s) we find ourselves in: our jobs, ages, illnesses, losses, wealth or poverty, marriages, divorces, parenting, care giving, and so on, in other words, our activities, our health, our relationships, and our responsibilities. These things are ever-changing. But our “life” refers to something deeper – something abiding and unchanging within us.

Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra makes a distinction between the material, ever-changing aspects of our life and that which is eternal. The material aspect, prakriti, is synonymous with our “life situation” – our age, our physical and mental condition, our role in the world. That which does not change, purusa, is the eternal, unchanging aspect of ourselves, often referred to as the soul, consciousness or spirit.

The Yoga Sutra teaches that if we believe that our “life situation” is the only thing we truly are, then we will identify with those things in our life that are temporary and cause suffering. I often hear people say, “I am old.” Being “old” and the consequent changes in our physical, energetic, and mental systems that accompany aging create distress for many of us. Yoga teaches that believing our body to be who we are, rather than recognizing our spiritual nature as our essence, causes suffering.

This is not to say the body isn’t real or that suffering isn’t real. It is when we identify so strongly with the impermanent aspects of ourselves to the exclusion of anything else that we get into trouble. For example, if I tell myself I will only be happy if I lose 5 pounds, I tie my happiness to how my body looks.

Yoga is about coming to a place of clarity and understanding that we are more than this physical body whose natural course is to change over time. We grasp that our “life” is something much deeper than “I am old” or “I am overweight”. Then, the decisions we make start to reflect that clarity.

For me, the process of moving from making decisions solely based upon my life situation to those informed by purusa has not been easy. With consistent yoga practice and study over time, along with faith and the support of others, I find it a bit easier to trust in my higher self and am more aware of where my actions are based.

When we make decisions from a place of clarity, with a sense of peace, and a “settled heart,” then our outcomes are almost always positive. This is when we rest in purusa. This is when we are living our life.

The Dilemma of Desire

Elizabeth Knowledge, Mindset July 24, 2015February 5, 2021balance, discipline, focus, perspective

Decorative Coffee

I have been thinking about trading in my old iphone 4 for a shiny new iphone 6. Some days when I sit staring at my phone, waiting for my email, or a news article, or a Facebook page to appear on the screen of my old phone, I imagine the ease a new phone might bring to my life. Emails arrive promptly; photos appear sharp and clear, and my searches materialize without glitches.

Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra tells us that most human beings suffer from afflictions – called klesas – that cause distress and suffering. You may be surprised to know that the main affliction, called avidya, is misapprehension, lack of understanding, or ignorance: we think we know something and we don’t, or we think we don’t know something and we do. This avidya manifests in our attitudes, relationships, and actions causing problems.

One of avidya‘s “children” is raga, which is best translated as a burning desire, attraction, or attachment to something. We have experienced a pleasant situation, and we want to repeat it again, and again, and again. In its most intense manifestation, raga is addiction.

Even today as I sat down to write, I kept thinking about making myself a nice cup of coffee with some foamy milk and stevia. For me, this kind of coffee has pleasant associations beyond the drink – things like sitting at a table under a palm tree outside a coffee shop on a sunny day in Los Angeles talking with my daughter, or sitting with my husband at Wegman’s enjoying a late afternoon coffee and muffin, or coming to my desk with my coffee and writing without hesitation something important for me to express.

Too much coffee has a down side for me, as well, causing heartburn and stomach discomfort, and, if caffeinated, leaving me feeling a little jittery and unable to focus. To think that the cup of coffee will leave me with only the pleasant feelings I have experienced in the past is avidya.

Patanjali calls avidya a confusion, mistaking “the ephemeral for the eternal, the impure for the pure, suffering for pleasure, the trivial for the essential” (YS II.5 as translated by Frans Moors in Liberating Isolation). This confusion is a source of suffering.

There is nothing wrong with buying an iphone 6 or having a cup of coffee with foamy milk. Suffering occurs when we obsess about having the phone or coffee, as if our ability to feel contentment depended upon having one or both. Or, on the other hand, we are so caught up by desire that we fail to see or acknowledge the possible negative effects the acquisition might bring.

To avoid the suffering that arises when raga becomes active requires noticing when the desire or attachments begin to appear. Then we can come to our yoga mat and practice, creating space so we have some distance or detachment from the object of our desire. That space can allow us to reflect on possible causes for the obsession, such as poor diet, lack of rest, or stress, as well as possible consequences. With an appropriate yoga practice we have the tools we need to come back to balance.

This week just begin to notice if raga may be coming up in your life.

A Question of Balance

Elizabeth Mindset June 17, 2015February 5, 2021balance, focus, perspective

The other morning, as the heat and humidity rose, I puzzled over the best place to plant my dill, tarragon, rosemary, cilantro, marigolds and zinnias. Our garden is in a bit of disorder, with garlic still maturing to harvest, lusciously overgrown rhubarb, large tufts of catmint, peppermint, lilies, sundrops, and a couple of tomatoes.

Sweat dripped from my face as I stepped one leg over the two-foot fence guarding our plantings. In my arms were plants, a trowel, and a digger. My focus was on where I would plant everything, and I was getting tired. Looking back, I can see that this was a set up for trouble. Not paying attention as I lifted the other leg over the fence, I was thrown off balance as my pant leg caught on the fence, throwing me to one side where I nearly fell on an overgrown thyme plant.
I was lucky. I was able to recover my balance rather than falling, but it reminded me how vulnerable we become when our attention wanders.

But losing one’s balance can occur in realms beyond a physical fall. Some of you may have heard me speak of the challenges I face when travelling, especially when I am away several weeks. The physical environment is different from where I live. The food and water I consume is new. My sleep and activities change, and I often feel on sensory overload. I may have enjoyed the time away, but I feel the imbalance in different parts of my system when I return home.

It takes time and patience to return to balance. A friend told me that rebalancing when we come home from a trip takes the same number of days as we were away. From my own experience I believe it.

Many students come to yoga class and tell me they need to improve their balance, meaning physical balance. Yoga talks about a model of the human system called the pancamaya model. This model describes five aspects of the human system: the physical, the energetic, the mental, the personality, and the emotional. They are all interrelated, meaning that an imbalance in any one aspect affects the others.

My fatigue and inattention in my garden the other morning were definitely aggravated by the heat and humidity. But I also have to remember that I am still recovering my balance from three and a half weeks of travel.

I share this with you with the hope you will start observing yourself. What throws you “off balance,” what can you do to reduce the effects, and what do you need to bring you back to balance.

EXPLORING BALANCE

8 week series focusing on balance in body, breath, and mind
Discovery Yoga: Wednesdays, June 17 – August 5, 5:45 – 7:15 pm
Yoga 4 Wise Women: Fridays, June 12 – August 7, 9:00 – 10:30 am
(no class July 10)
TMC, wellness through movement, 2134 N. 2nd, Harrisburg.
For more information, contact me:
eterryyoga@gmail.com or 717-645-0067

OMG or OOPS

Elizabeth Advice, Mantras June 8, 2015February 5, 2021chants, discipline, focus, perspective, yoga sutra

Whenever I go to study at my Vedic Chant workshops I learn something new – something that will not only help me to move forward in my chanting, but something that also can help me live my life with greater focus, peace, and self-confidence.

Before our workshop ended, Sonia Nelson, our “guru” of Vedic Chant, explained how we might approach our own chanting study once we were home and on our own. She did this by focusing on how we might behave when we see we are making a mistake in our chanting practice.

The first way she called the “OMG” reaction. We hear ourselves stumbling in our chanting, and we react as if our mistake is a crisis – “oh, my god.” As Sonia explained, this reaction creates fertile ground for the antarayas or obstacles, as described in Yoga Sutra I.30-31, to grow. Thoughts of self-doubt can arise about our ability to chant or what our teacher might think. As the reaction plays out, we may feel defeated in our endeavor, the mind is disturbed, we feel anxious, and we suffer. As this unfolds, we lose any opportunity to determine how we might proceed to deal with the mistake, itself.

The second way she called the “OOPS” response. We hear a mistake in our chanting and stop with “oops, what happened here?” Then we look more closely at the mistake to see how we might deal with it. Perhaps we need to break a phrase into syllables – small chunks – to practice and correct the error. Then we can rebuild the phrase by focusing on the syllable, adding another, chanting it several times, and adding another until we can chant the entire line correctly.

What we do not do with the “OOPS” response is trigger a crisis in our bodies and minds. Instead, our minds remain clear so we can move forward rather than staying stuck.

By now you can probably see how this model can help us in our everyday lives. We free ourselves from having to anxiously try to make every endeavor “perfect,” which, of course, we never can do. Nor do we have to pillory ourselves for every mistake. Instead, we can determine calmly the best action to take.

Chapter II of the Yoga Sutra gives us the eight limbs of yoga as a path to “discernment and clear perception.” The first limb or yama prescribes five principles to guide our relationships. The first principle is ahimsa, which is considered the most important. Ahimsa is the practice of “nonhurtfulness toward others and ourselves,” according to Nicolai Bachman in The Path of the Yoga Sutras. He goes on to say, “A nonjudgmental and forgiving attitude is essential to practicing ahimsa.”

I ask you to reflect: if you wish to make ahimsa a principle you practice, how are you going to respond to your mistakes – “OMG” or “OOPS?”

Coming Home

Elizabeth Advice, Health, Mindset June 2, 2015February 5, 2021discipline, focus, perspective, philosophy

I just got off the phone with my dear friend and fellow yoga teacher Lynne Graham. Some of you may remember Lynne from the lovely practices she taught the Yoga for Wise Women class as she was completing her teacher training.

Lynne is one of those people who continues to learn about and delve more and more deeply into the study of yoga. In our conversation, she explained she has come to see problems that arise in life as opportunities to motivate further study of yoga, knowing the philosophy and practices of yoga hold insights and healing for challenges we experience. It is a way to approach positively what might have felt like a large obstacle.

As she labored over planning for a yoga class, Lynne explained, she decided to give up her usual routine of drinking coffee, recognizing that coffee was not helping her, and perhaps making the planning process more difficult.

I understood exactly how unfocused the mind can become after having too much caffeine. Rather than connecting more deeply with the tasks at hand, my mind is on caffeine is like a fly, buzzing here and there, landing briefly, then buzzing off to alight on another thought. Even without caffeine, I have found myself, from time to time, distracted, thinking answers to my problem lie outside myself – in a book, if I find the right page, in notes if I can only find them, in a website – any place other than within me. This kind of search is usually fruitless, just another distraction, really, from focusing on what I need to do.

Breaking from her coffee routine, Lynne decided instead to do some chanting, a breathing practice, and meditation. What she found was that this new approach yielded a focus, a certainty of direction for the class she would be teaching.

Her insight – beyond the immediate planning for her class – was to realize she already had the knowledge she needed. And, the way to access that knowledge was to make space to go within. This is the intention of our yoga practice: letting go of the distractions of the mind. In doing so we can come to see ourselves more clearly. In observing ourselves with greater clarity, we come to know ourselves, which is the goal of yoga.

Our yoga practice, done over time consistently, illuminates a path leading us to look within. It is where we can find answers, as well as peace, and faith. It is a going home.

Thank you, Lynne, for this reminder.

The Anniversary Tree

Elizabeth Advice, Seasons April 29, 2015February 5, 2021acceptance, perspective, philosophy, seasons

Last Sunday my husband, Jim, and I celebrated our twenty-ninth anniversary. We had married the end of April as I had wanted a spring date, thinking it the perfect time to start something new.

On the day of our wedding, my brother-in-law and family brought us a young weeping cherry tree and planted it in our back yard. Each year since, we eagerly have awaited the knots of delicate pink blooms as if they were our anniversary gift.

But over the years the tree has waned, the blossoms fewer and the number of barren branches growing. We consulted an arborist and fed the tree to improve its vigor. We had years when we thought it looked hardier, and some when we were certain it was in its last season.

After the cold winter last year, the tree failed to blossom at all, the buds tight before turning to leaves. My mind is good at wandering to seek meaning or read a sign into such events. So you can imagine the fears raised by our anniversary tree’s absence of blooms.

Not knowing what to expect of the tree his year, we were full of hope for its rebirth as pink buds covered the branches. Our hopes were met with a number of knots of pink blossoms, even more lovely as goldfinches sat among them, waiting a turn for sunflower seeds. Even so, most buds remain tightly closed and many branches barren. Much will go when we prune the dead wood.

Sometimes we have things in our lives we cling to as they represent something important, something deeply significant and dear. We become so attached that to let go feels almost like a betrayal. In the case of our anniversary tree, as it blossomed it reminded us of our pledge to one another, our relationship. To see the tree age and fade reminded us not only of our own mortality, but also of the fragility of relationship.

I know we will miss our tree when we finally take it down. As with so many things now gone, we will still talk about it, perhaps frame a picture. But there comes a time to let go, to make room for something new.

Already we talk about replacing our wedding tree with something strong and hardy. Perhaps a red bud. And we don’t need to have a big tree, thinking we may not have the years it might take to grow it full and large. As I told Jim, instead we will plant with faith in something new to come. And, also hold in memory the starting point of something lovely, beloved.