From PublicAddress.net
Sunday: Recently I have been using Richard Freeman's Yoga Breathing, two guided CDs on the art of pranayama, to practice with at home. But once a month Peter Nilsson holds a pranayama class at the Yoga Academy on a Sunday morning; I always attend that. We begin by chanting, in Sanskrit, "I bow to Patanjali, that greatest of sages, who removed the imperfection of the mind by yoga, and that of speech by grammar, and that of the body by medicine." I find this chant to be most eloquent.
Sometimes we start by doing the A and B salutes to open shoulders and hips. Today we hang off the backs of chairs to open shoulders and sit in a cross-legged forward bend, svastikasana, to open hips. This is a simple posture that always fills me with a tremendous sense of well-being, not only because of the pleasing physical sensation of the stretch in the hip flexors, but I instantly feel, inwardly, kind of smoothed out in svastikasana. I guess it's the power of the solar symbol svastika at work. (The right-handed, male svastika, with arms bending clockwise, represents the spring sun and the benign power of Ganesha. The left-handed, female, anticlockwise svastika represents the autumn sun and the destructive goddess Kali. As the whole world knows, the inauspicious left-handed Kali version is the Nazi svastika of choice.)
After the joints have stretched and shifted we concertina three blankets three times, pile them on top of one another and lie down with the skinny stack of blankets running from the nape of the neck and tapering off underneath the sacrum. In this position we can experience the full openness of the chest. It's much harder to do this when sitting upright – at least, it is for me. So, lying down, I like to put a blanket over my face too, leaving only my nostrils and my mouth exposed. We belly breathe to get an equal inhale and exhale (sama vritti) and then turn on the ujjayi breathing and the bandhas.
I find that it is possible to engage mula bandha, more or less, when I'm supine but mula bandha is much more fleeting when I'm upright in practice. I particularly can't get it at all in dog down, which is why I don't have a floaty jump forward. But in other standing postures I can sometimes get it, it comes and goes. When mula bandha does switch on, I know it because you feel the little jolt of energy, the lift, that it gives you
It was a calm session. Peter goes around the class, occasionally adjusting people, so their chests are open and shoulders down. He always tells people to stop at anytime and lie down and breathe normally if they feel any agitation or un-ease. I go straight to kumbaka. I've written before about practicing this form of breath retention. I find kumbaka very comfortable and especially like the way the floating in between the breaths prefigures the empty mind of meditation. I always like to practice pranayama, even though I find it demanding. From the outside it looks as though absolutely nothing is happening – but the level of concentration is intense. I can sit in meditation now without my hips and knees or hurting or without my feet going numb. At least, I can for 30 minutes – which is but an eyeblink, I know, to a practiced meditator.
After we finished, I asked Peter why he didn't teach nadi shodana, alternate nostril breathing. (The second, nerve-cleansing, series of ashtanga is also called nadi shodana.) He replied that Pattabhi Jois had told him a few years ago that it wasn't necessary to include alternate nostril breathing in your pranayama, if you had a regular ashtanga asana practice, because you would be clean and balanced enough from that.
MONDAY
How did this happen? Out of nowhere I had a totally terrible practice tonight. Sitting postures. Jump-throughs. Felt way bad about them. Maybe it's because I, untypically, practiced in the evening. It's a little problematic at the moment melding my ashtanga practice with the book I am writing. They both compete for my attention first thing in the morning. So, I was thinking, maybe I should change the time of day I practice. I used to be too tired to do ashtanga in the evenings, but I've got more stamina now.
Driving into the city in the early evening is a very different start to practice than driving in between dawn. I couldn't find anywhere to park. Had to pay five dollars. Was running late on account of not being able to park. The studio seemed much less calm in the evening; the practice room was packed with people. The temperature was very hot and I felt like I couldn't breathe.
My practice was crap. I had the worst attitude about it and I was all confused about where this downer state of mind had come from. I got more and more pissed off. Is my pelvis EVER going to rotate forward so that dandasana is comfortable? WHY can't I bind on the left side in the marichys? Bhujapidasana … arrgghh! I couldn't get my shoulder underneath my thigh. I felt incredibly stiff and heavy. Aren't you supposed to be more flexible in the day/evening? I wasn't enjoying the practice at all.
Afterwards Jude spoke about two of the yamas: ahimsa and satya. Non-violence and truthfulness. Non-violence towards the self. I could see that was a lesson I needed to learn this evening. I was really beating up on myself during the practice. Jude was talking about it in regard to the physical practice; people wanting to "get" a posture and going to any lengths, risking injury so that they can say they can do it, doing postures that you really not ready for, because you are not open enough or strong enough. I could see that my specialty, tonight anyway, was mental ahimsa: self-criticism, self-diminishment.
Satya, she said, is about being honest. For example, telling a teacher or assistant that you are not happy with the adjustment they're giving you. Or being honest about where you are with your practice – sometimes working too hard or too soft. For instance, you only did three navasanas instead of five. If you can't manage five properly then you should do five modified ones.
It's all about - sigh - mastering the ego. Tonight, my pesky me-ness seemed ultra vast and ultra getting-in-the way.
Ashtanga is about looking in the face of what is, not what should be or could be or might be.
The workshops for next year have been published. One is with Richard Spann. I'm not familiar with his name and I can't find anything about him in the web. In May 2004 Dena Kingsberg is returning to hold another workshop. This could be an interesting experience for me to give the Dena K experience a second chance, seeing as, to my absolute surprise, I loathed the workshop of hers that I did earlier this year. I expected to love Dena, but I didn't at all.
During the entire week (which cost $250) I only got one interaction with her, when she chastised me for my practice. "You've got to put more into it than that." I explained that I was doing the practice that Peter Sanson had given me.
I thought there was a lot of pride and aggression about her approach, although I must say that she has a beautiful voice and the pranayama she did at the beginning of each session was wonderful. But then she would give a little talk as well, which was big on "blaming". Sort of along the lines of: You are every bad thing you've done; every glass of alcohol you've drunk, every cigarette you ever smoked, every piece of meat you ate etc You are TOXIC and you need this practice to sort you out …. It was all a bit too fundamentalist fire and brimstone for my taste.
TUESDAY
Why am I all overboard about parking this week? As warmer weather has arrived, the morning Mysore class has suddenly swelled considerably and at 6.15 this morning when I arrived in Federal Street there were, incredibly, no parking spaces left and the room was already mat-to-mat when I came in. Except for the front row where nobody new likes to go. Jude, however, always tries to persuade new people to put down their mat next to an advanced practitioner, because she says the slow, measured breathing of an experienced ashtangi provides a calm aura to practice around.
This morning I was workmanlike in order to counter my bubbling-under agitation about needing to get to work on my writing this morning. I was tired of trying to concentrate on breath and bandhas and drishti. I wanted to work on my book. Usually I'm quite slow with my counts, but this morning I whipped through the salutes and the standings and then, when I sat down, I suddenly realised that my all-over-the-place state of mind was gone and I felt calm and was enjoying the practice, even though I got that weird panic-stricken thing in halasana again.
No matter how crummy my mental and physical state is when I come to practice, I ALWAYS feel better afterwards.