Embracing the Flow :: Living Your Dharma

So I share this at the risk of sounding slightly crazy (for those who know me I think it goes without saying that I'm pretty open to the metaphysical world), but I recently consulted an "Intuitive Counselor" (i.e. psychic) who came highly recommended to me from two trusted and totally normal friends. She knew only two things about me: my first name and my cell phone number. She doesn't want to know anything else, because she doesn't want to be accused of researching her clients.

At 11:00 a.m. I called her for our appointment, after a brief introduction she asked me not to say anything because she didn't want me to muddle or confuse any images that came to her. Then for about 7 minutes there was silence. When she finally spoke she said to me, "You help people find their way and get unstuck, you show them new ways of seeing and you are on the leading edge of life." OK, pretty generic, I agree, but also pretty spot on. Then she said, "In a past life you were a famous dancer. This is the symbol for the teacher; perhaps you use movement or dance to help people get unstuck." Now we're talking. How the heck did she do that?!?!?!!?

She told me very many more interesting things about myself which resonated as true, but I remain totally baffled by that that statement because of its overwhelming truth: being a Yogini, a Yoga teacher and a studio owner—someone who uses movement to help people get unstuck—is my Dharma (living in order with the cosmos and one's pre-determined life's path).

The need to move has been pervasive throughout my life. My mother has told me that I spent my entire childhood dancing, she said that my need to move as a child was so overwhelming that I couldn't make it through dinner without performing a dance in front of the kitchen table: I remember it. I also remember coming home from elementary school and tumbling around the living room for hours in some sort of dance/gymnastics hybrid that probably looked a lot like Yoga and coming to dinner a red-faced, sweaty mess. As I grew older and more self-conscious, I transferred the energy from perpetual motion into athletics as they were a socially acceptable arena for movement and I learned to sit through dinner. Even so, throughout high school and college, anytime you put an open field in front of me, I was guaranteed to start cartwheeling and handspringing my way down the field, much to my friends' dismay. All I can say is I really couldn't help it . . . I really had to move.

So this of course makes Yoga such a natural fit for me. I did Yoga for a long time before I really found the flow. Both Ashtanga and Baptiste Yoga are flow based, so they both opened the door to flow, but when I found the intuitive sequencing and dancelike flow of teachers like Shiva Rae and Sarah Thompson Beyer, I knew I was home. A while back I blogged about my love for the Idaho Mountains and how the first time I visited them I had this overwhelming sense of knowing that I was home, I had the same overwhelming sense of knowing that somehow I was on my path the first time I practiced Yoga in this free and dancelike way. I was not doing the Yoga, I was not straining in the poses, the flow was simply moving through me in this totally liberated and authentic way, I was totally out of my head—released from repetitive thought patterns—and pure life source moved through me. It was, and still is, total bliss for me to move in this way.

And it's also so easy for me to teach this way. I never plan a class, I never plan a sequence. I simply get on my mat and the sequences flow through me. I've had other teachers ask me to create workshops on creating flow based sequences and I honestly have no clue how I could share this information: it simply arrives. It's an unstudied, intuitive and totally authentic experience. So I send them to Shiva and Sarah!

Every day I wake up overwhelmed with gratitude that I found my Dharma and I actually get to live it. I can't believe that I get to spend every day using movement to help people get unstuck. I can't believe I get to spend my whole life moving! Mostly I'm beyond grateful for the AMAZING group of people for whom this style of Yoga resonates. It's only because of their willingness and openness to move freely that I get to teach, that I get to live my Dharma. This week I got an email from a client that said, [When you teach you] "make jokes, expressions etc ... it makes the class more fun and energetic instead of just sort of routine.  You're the 'master' at that and it makes all the difference!" To which I replied, "Thanks for the compliment, I LOVE teaching so much, it's easy to be light and fun b/c I'm having so much fun!" I'm in my flow, I'm living my Dharma . . . . I could not be luckier, happier or more fulfilled.

Namaste

Embracing the Flow :: Sitting with Sensation

Now that I'm in my late 30's and I've had two kids, it inevitably happens about twice a year: I'll pull on a favorite pair of jeans and realize that they're snug. Now I'm a huge believer in radical self acceptance and self love, but what can I say? I don't like it when my stomach hangs over my pants . . . So when the pants are snug, I hop on the dusty scale (which I otherwise ignore) to confirm my suspicions and force acknowledgement of the fact that I've been mindlessly plowing through cocktail hour and dinner with reckless abandon. Sure it's fun, I am hyper social: happiest when the calendar is full and activities are flowing, but this means a lot of food and cocktail centered gatherings, which can mean slipping into mindless and habitual eating and drinking. What I dislike the most about weight gain is not the weight itself (though muffin top isn't pretty), it's the fact that the weight is symbolic of my inability to sit with sensation and practice a little restraint (brahmacharya).

Our human nature is hard-wired to resist sensation. When hunger arises, we eat, when we want a cocktail we drink. For some people, the total inability to sit with sensation leads to constantly numbing ourselves: we feel pain, hunger, craving, longing and we stuff the sensation away with TV, spending, sex, food, drugs, alchohol . . . . pick your poison. Anything to not feel. We don't even think about it. We stuff sensation away, we fill it up. We satisfy our cravings and we don't feel pain, love, connection when we are stuffed full of our poison of choice. Bramacharya is one of the 8 Limbs of Yoga and one of the most misunderstood. Bramacharya directly translates to sexual celibacy. But many modern scholars view it more as harnessing control of "sensory and sensual pleasures that distract us." A recent Yoga Journal article about brahmacharya included this quote, "If we don't realize there's an alternative to being driven by our desires, we don't have any choice in how we act. Our culture does a really good job of encouraging us to indulge our desires and ignore any signals beyond them."*

So this is not about beating myself up or degrading myself because of few extra pounds on the scale (I actually am amazingly finally beyond that), but the painful truth is that when I gain weight it is only because I've slipped into the mindless mode of indulging to fill up, to take the sensations of wanting and craving and stuff them full so as to not feel them. And for me radical self-acceptance and radical self-love does not mean to love the extra pounds, it means to demand the best of myself which is mindfulness and presence around everything that I do.

I look forward to getting to place where the mindfulness never slips (it's a path, I'm on it, it will occur) but for now when I become aware of the fact that my human frailty and mindless indulgences have wrecked havoc on my waistline, I start the process of re-training myself to sit with sensation and practice a little restraint. When I'm really hungry and mindless, I grab a scone at a coffee shop. When I'm mindful, I allow the sensation of hunger to arise and I sit with it without trying to dissipate it. I simply observe the sensation. I let myself feel it without attaching to it or making a false statement like "I'm starving" (cause really,not many of us are starving). Always, and inevitably, the acuteness passes and I can wait until I get home or to a juice bar to fill up on Prana filled foods.

When I am in the mode of mindful eating I'm also acutely aware of the sensation of taking in food. I notice each bite and I allow the food to fill me up. On Friday night I munched my way through cocktail hour with a Kombucha tea and fresh, raw vegetables. By the time dinner came, I was no longer hungry. Mindless me would have taken a giant plate of food and kept my wine glass full throughout dinner anyway, but as I'm in the space of noticing sensation, I put a very small amount food on my plate to participate in the social aspect of dinner without plowing through a giant wine-fueled meal. It's amazing how much less we need to feel full when we are really paying attention to sensation.

I also avoid obsessing: I had cocktails with friends on our beautiful sunny Saturday afternoon, and that doesn't mean I somehow failed, I made a conscious and mindful decision to simply enjoy a beautiful summer afternoon and the socializing aspect of the cocktails without attachment or self-degradation.

Asana (physical yoga) is a really amazing place to come into the space of allowing sensation to arise and learning to simply sit with it, resisting the urge to indulge. I see people grip against sensation all of the time, I'll bring students into a deep stretch or a challanging pose and I'll watch their jaws clench, their neck muscles bulge and their eyes pop as they resist the pose and the uncomfortable sensations the pose can create. Or they simply come out of the pose right away, instantly indulging in a craving. I even see people use muscular effort resist the most delicious poses like ½ pigeon or supine twist because they don't even allow themselves to feel the sensations of relief and release. In class tonight, I watched students stress and strain in a challenging pose and said, "it's a Yoga mat, not a battle field." So what happens when we do stop the battle? When we simply let go, breath and allow the sensations of the pose to arise without trying to squash and resist them? We find ease, we find release, and we find peace. As in life as on the mat: allow sensation to arise, sit with it, practice a little self-restraint, breath through the discomfort, breath through the craving and find ease, release and peace.

Namaste

Embracing the Flow :: Forgiving

May you feel safe and protected
May you feel contended and pleased
May your body support you with strength
May your life unfold smoothly and with ease.

No one loves a little human drama more than I do. I have to admit, I've spent a life time being "quick to flip" (off other drivers that is); I've spent countless hours having "fights" in my head in which I finally, and spectacularly tell-off someone who's wronged me with some brilliant and well timed insult. I've told my (really awesome) husband that I'm filing for divorce no less than 3000 times. I've dropped the f-bomb in front of my kids . . . I've done, what we as humans, are programmed to do: react to and engage in the human drama which involves quite a bit of ill-serving self righteousness and the belief that we've somehow been transgressed.

For at least two thirds of my life, I had no awareness that this was in anyway wrong or harmful to me. But with a daily Yoga practice, I started to be able to physically feel the energetic harm that this causes. When I lash out in anger towards my children, my chest constricts and my pulse races. When I believe I've been "transgressed" and I engage in the inner negative dialogue, my chest tightens and I feel flutters of ill-ease in my gut. If I ever even noticed these physical and energetic reactions before, I blamed them on others: I believed that it was my children's negative behavior or the transgression of the other that caused me harm. What I now know for sure is that no one else's behavior creates the physiological reactions or the stres; it is ONLY my reaction to their behaviors, my engagement in the human drama, that causes me harm.

I really learned this lesson last year when involved in some legal drama. I was all the way "in:" self-righteous, indignant, and attached. As a result I was stressed, physically, mentally and financially (my amazing lawyer bills at $475/hr!?!?!?!). I could physiologically feel the stress, but again, I blamed this on the other.

In was in the midst of this drama that I read Yoga and the Quest for the True Self by Stephen Cope (one of the best, accessible and comprehensive Yoga texts I've ever read). It was in this book, that I learned about the power of forgiveness and the powerful tool that metta mantra is for achieving forgiveness. Essentially it's as simple as bringing your adversary into your consciousness, picturing this person and connecting to him or her then repeating the metta mantra over and over again, directing it to that person. May you feel safe and protected, May you feel contended and pleased, May your body support you with strength, May your life unfold smoothly and with ease. The first time I did this, I found the practice difficult and painful to initiate. As soon as I drew my "adversary" into consciousness, the heart palpitations started, the anger arose. But within minutes of repeating the mantra, the negative energy literally dissipated all of the way. It felt like a miracle. A sense of calm washed over me, and all of the negativity was gone. I could actually see the good in my "adversary" and he no longer felt like an adversary at all. The situation simply became a business problem to be dealt with and managed as such without giving it any undue energy. Anytime anger or stress came back into my consciousness, I repeated the mantra, and it always worked to dissipate the negativity.

I realized the power of the mantra, and I thought, if this works for an adversarial situation, how will it work in the rest of my life? Magically!!!! " You didn't invite me to your party? " may you feel safe and protected . . . . . "You drew all over the white couch with a ball point pen?!?!" may you feel contented and pleased . . . . "You're going to another Husky fundraiser? You played golf yesterday and you work 24/7!" may your body support you with strength . . . "What do you mean you oversold the flight?!?!?!" may your life unfold smoothly and with ease.

Embracing the Flow :: Aligning with Place

Everything in the universe is pure energy, pure light and pure vibration. This is not a radical or esoteric concept: we know via modern physics that everything in the physical world is, at its essence, comprised of electrons and neutrons, or pure energy. So we understand that everything is imperceptibly vibrating at all times at a certain frequency. Whether or not we know this, we feel it. We call it gut instinct. It happens all the time when we meet people, often times we know right away whether or not the other person is a vibrational match. It's a strong sense of knowing that we feel in our core. As I drove into my personal sanctuary Sunday night, in the mountains of Southern Idaho, I was thinking about how powerful vibrational alignment can be with place as well. Just like people, places have their own vibrational frequency, and sometimes our gut instinct or awareness of vibrational alignment, creates an opportunity for connection.

Like many Seattleites, I grew up coming to Sun Valley on vacation, and I always loved it, but I was visiting as a child on someone else's agenda, not as an autonomous adult. In my late high-school/early college years, my parents traded in their skis for their clubs and Sun Valley fell off of the radar. My junior year in college I fell in love with a world-class ski racer and reconnected with Sun Valley. Every relationship, every connection we create has a purpose and a lesson to teach, there are no accidents, and I honestly believe that my ski racer came into my life simply to re-connect me to these mountains.

As I was driving up HWY 20, I remembered my first drive back here as an adult at age 21: I could remember exactly where we pulled off of the road, I could smell the air same as it was 15 years ago and see the same tone of light on the mountains. I could feel the crispness of the cool mountain air and see how the elevation and dry air create a visual acuteness and austerity that we just don't see amidst our Seattle humid marine layer. The reason the memory is so clear is that I was having a moment of awareness: I don't know how to describe these amazingly powerful moments of connection in life that we all have, but I could feel an awesome sense of knowing that in some way I was coming home.

While my relationship with said ski racer crashed and burned, my relationship with Sun Valley has persevered. In so many ways, Sun Valley has created my adult identity: it was here that I discovered my pure love of the mountains and being outside, which lead to years of glacier climbing and avid hiking. It was here that I learned to love mountain biking and that my own skiing advanced from that of recreational skier to competitive ski racer. It was here that I learned that there is nothing I love more than hours alone, outside, up high with my heart pumping and my hair on fire. It was through my connection to the mountains that I learned that when our physical bodies work really hard with a singular purpose, like getting up the hill, we can enter a trance like state of Dharana (singluar focus). We fall into a rhythm with our movements and our breath and the rest of the world falls away. With this clarity of purpose and intensity of effort we pranify (energize) the body and purify the mind. This has influenced the way I teach: in challenging asana classes were looking for those moments when the entire physical body is awake and alive, focused, and working while the mind is clear and present to this effort: moments where we're so engaged in our practice that we achieve Dharana and the world falls away. It is in the challenge that a lot people find this sense of release. And of course this makes obvious the reason for the studio's name--Mountain Flow Yoga.

Ironically many of my major life events have unfolded here as well: while in Sun Valley with the ski racer, my future husband and I connected for the first time on the back deck of Lefty's (a local dive). He told me he loved me here sealing our fate. My first child was conceived here and I discovered my second pregnancy while here. Weird? No, there are no accidents nor coincidences in this universe: the fact that all of these major life events unfolded here was simply a clear indication of my vibrational alignment and synchronicity with this place.

So now here I am 15 years later. Driving in I stopped on 20 and got out of the car simply to smell the desert sage and feel the crispness of the dry mountain air: I've spent the last two days exhausting and challenging my body while exhilarating my mind. After hours alone, on the hiking and mountain biking trails (heart pumping and hair on fire!), I stretch out my sore and aching muscles with a little Yoga--a little pure Mountain Flow.

Namaste

Embracing the Flow :: Living Uninhibitedly

We waste so much time worrying about what others think of us. And it really is a waste of time: first of all, they're likely not thinking about us much at all and secondly, we're unlikely going to be able to change their opinions of us if they are giving us much attention. Self-evaluation based on other people's opinions of us propels us into a state of inhibition and fear. We mask who we really are to conform because of the fear of rejection. "To be alive is the biggest fear humans have. Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive -- the risk to be alive and express what we really are. Just being ourselves is the biggest fear of humans. We have learned to live our lives trying to satisfy other people's demands. We have learned to live by other people's points of view because of the fear of not being accepted and not being good enough for someone else."*

Letting go of inhibition and self-evaluation based on others is essential to embracing the flow and cultivating a joyful life. The studio is such an incredibly safe place to practice dropping inhibition. Getting onto your mat and embracing the flow requires us to let go of both physical and mental rigidity. We have to let go of a little self-control simply to move freely in the flow—when we do this, the asana start to flow through us like a dance

In the modern Western world, we've let go of ritual dance, but uninhibited movement has long been essential for human connection and celebration. This movement releases stagnant energy, connects us to the systems of the body and connects us in a flow with those around us. In a very safe way, our Asana practice re-creates this ritual dance. This is actually my favorite thing about teaching Groove Yoga Flow (a dance-like Asana flow with loud modern music), I get to watch the transformation as people drop their inhibition, move freely and joyfully and often with giant smiles on their faces.

So we come to the mat and we practice moving freely without judgment of ourselves or others, we move stagnant energy around and we engage in our own bodies without inhibition. If we do this often enough, it is inevitable that we will take this lack of inhibition off of the mat with us. This is why we call it a practice. It's a place to safely practice embracing the flow and living without inhibition.

It's always a practice and a work in progress to let go of what we believe others think of us, but like fear, we can release it. Releasing the fear of rejection, moving freely, and living without inhibition are essential to embracing the flow: invite song, dance, movement and freedom into your life and practice letting go. Dance like no one's watching because they probably aren't.

Namaste

*The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz

Embracing the Flow :: Living Fearlessly

Fear was a dominant emotion in my life until I began studying Yoga philosophy. As an environmental sciences major in college, I often felt completely gripped with fear. Constantly studying and evaluating humanity's destruction of the natural world convinced me of the planet's sure demise. This constant state of fear left me feeling off-balance and often very insecure about the stability of human life. These fears worsened substantially post-college when 9/11 struck New York City: I was certain that not only would there be an environmental collapse, but likely a nuclear or chemical one as well. I showed up in the world much in the same way that I do today: I was social and charismatic, I'm quite sure that I appeared happy, and I was. But this was an insecure happiness as I was sure my happiness could be stolen from me at any moment due to outside forces.

One of the most powerful components of embracing flow is learning to live without fear. Living fearlessly is essential for cultivating true happiness: fearlessness is freedom in its purest form. I will make it clear that I'm am not the Buddha: it is a long path and I'm in my infancy, but through Yoga, I've learned a lot about living fearlessly. Yoga has been an essential tool in this transformation. For me living fearlessly has manifested from four key components: 1) cultivating a non-reactive mind through practicing detachment, 2) believing in Karma (fate), 3) accepting the idea of Maya and 4) practicing free-will.

1) Calm Abiding and Detachment
Through my time on mat and my study Yoga I've learned this: the world is ALWAYS in sate of balance, always. For every evil there is good, for all the darkness there is light. We, as physical beings, have chosen this world to live as it is a world of contrasts--both good and evil, and through these contrasts we make decisions about what is right for our own growth and our own path. The evil that we see out there is simply someone else living their own life, burning off their own Karma. It's only a part of our own story and our own drama if we allow the space for it. Living fearlessly requires practicing detachment. When good news comes, enjoy it, when bad news comes, let it go. We know the world is always changing and always contrasting, so why are we surprised when things are bad? When we grip and attach to fear believing things will never get better we participate in the downward spiral and unwittingly promote negativity. A constant state of negativity is simply not possible: the law of impermanence is always at work, and things will always get better. And they will always get worse. We can't control the flux, so we must learn to control our reactions to the flux and our attachment to the highs and lows by cultivating a non-reactive mind. "The act of detachment can and will help you to live a life of fearlessness and joy."*

2) Belief in Karma/Fate
Believing in the idea of Karma has been an amazing tool for releasing fear. I accept that not everyone open to the idea of Karma, and I'm certainly not one to push it (although it is interesting to note that far more people and faiths in the world believe in Karma than don't), but accepting the idea of Karma/fate is powerful for living fearlessly. Yogic philosophy teaches that there are neither accidents nor coincidences in life. Everything happens for a reason and everything happens to teach us lessons that are necessary for our own growth--our own Karmic progression. Here's an example of how accepting this idea has released me from a state of living in fear. I've always been completely terrified of earthquakes, literally gripped. Convinced it was the big one, I once hit the deck at Gene Jaurez as the ground started to shake, after totally humiliating myself, I learned that the shaking was only the spin cycle on their industrial washing machine in the next room. Hmmm, GRIPPED. Believing in Karma (fate) has helped me deal with this fear: I now believe that if I am in Seattle and around for the inevitable "big one" it's only because I'm supposed to be. Every time I feel the fear creep in--like when I'm driving on the viaduct--I take a deep breath, and remind myself that perhaps the big one is my fate, perhaps it isn't and it probably isn't for me to decide. It's such a simple concept, it's hard to believe it works, but it does release the fear of the unknown. "Knowing that you are living in perfect alignment with a universal plan requires faith, especially when you do not get what you want. Everything is as it should be. Understanding this allows you to relax and live your life in harmony."**

3) Accepting the Idea of Maya
The ancient Yogis have taught us that the world is an illusion that they called Maya. Modern physics, starting with Einstein's Unified Field Theory, have proven the idea of Maya. Einstein discovered that the entire physical world is simply vibration: pure energy. Everything, at its purest form, is made up of electrons and neutrons, which are nothing and everything, pure energy: mass-less and illusory. Even the rock that we perceive as so real is literally shaking in its boots as pure energy. The complexity of Maya is that the Yogi's never said the physical world isn't real; it's very real, they simply explain that it is as transient to our entire experience as a spiritual being as a dream is to our physical being. Maya is explained s a physical manifestation of collective beliefs. If we accept this Yogic teaching and understand the transient nature of our physical lives, we can let go of the fear of inhabiting this life. Regardless of what happens to us in this physical realm, our true selves, our consciousness and spirit will live on. Accepting the limitless and timelessness of our essence and recognizing that our time on Earth is just a blip on the map or Maya, we are released from living in fear.

4) Practicing Free Will
Finally, and most importantly, we are released from living with fear when we understand the power of living with free will. Nothing is scripted for us, nothing is set in stone. We have free-will and we are our own fate-makers. "Nothing in time and space is meant to be, except for what already exists in the present and all that awaits in the future that will be determined by your ever-evolving beliefs and expectations. Tomorrow is a blank slate."***

*The Yogi in You -- Cameron Alborian

**Wishing: How to Fulfill Your Heart's Desires -- Eliazbeth Harper

***Infinite Possibilities: The Art of Lving Your Dreams -- Mike Dooley

"Life is always flowing to you and through you, but for you to have conscious deliberate awareness of it is the ultimate in truly living. Accomplishing end result is manifestation: consciously managing and maintaining your vibrational balance is Deliberate Living. And it is what we call living the Art of Allowing.

* * *

You are far more Vibration and Energy than you are the physical Being that you recognize with you." -The Amazing Power of Deliberate Intent: Living the Art of Allowing

Often in class I invite students to allow by saying, "Rather than studying and attaching to the repetitive thoughts that are racing through your head as you evaluate the sequence, your performance of it or the practices of others around you, study your own physical body. Listen to and feel your heart beat, notice the quality of the breath, drop consciousness into the surface of the skin where your circulation, your pulse converges with the energy of the charged particles in the air around you. Let go of expectations, performance anxiety and fear: simply allow the sequence to flow through you, and do the best that your body allows for. Allow yourself to arrive on your mat, to surrender rather than to perform, to flow rather than to strive: dance with life." Engaging in asana in a sate of flow creates mindfulness and awareness of the state of allowing. When we cultivate the state of flow on the mat, we are able to study this state of allowing. Eventually mindfulness around flowing and allowing permeates our entire life experience.

Through time on the mat we start to notice and physically feel our thoughts: we become aware that they are often repetitive and limiting bringing us into a state of reacting and resisting the flow, i.e. "this is so hard, my mat is so slippery, why is the person next to me breathing so loud, that guy has something weird on his toe, I'm hungry and want to be done with class . . . .." We've all been there! This is one of the primary reasons why the Yoga is so hard: we need to create opportunities for discomfort and resistance in order to study our reactions and limiting beliefs and dissipate them by moving into the state of flowing and allowing. Studying our bodies as pure energy--as physical manifestations of our alive-ness--we move slowly but surely out of our foggy state of resistance and disconnection towards our state of flowing and allowing. Next time your in class and you hear the tape recorder of your thoughts start to play, detach, breath, study your physical body, surrender to the sequence and FLOW.