Meditation
Spirit Guides
The Beauty of Listening
I spent this past weekend in a meditation workshop with a small group of fellow yoga teachers with whom I’ve been studying asana and philosophy for many years. We engaged in multiple meditations with breaks to write notes and share information. The act of setting aside a weekend to do this created a space within which our minds were able to become quiet.
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The Beauty of the Unknown
This morning I woke up at 6:30 am when the alarm on my iPhone went off. It was still dark out, cool, rainy, and almost completely silent, but I could hear my friends moving about the room. Sharon Kenny and I were upstate assisting our friend Zhenja LaRosa with an Anusara® Teacher Training retreat and the three of us had personal meditation practices that we planned to do before joining the group. As each of us moved into our individual meditations, I found my mind wandering off, distracted by my fatigue and my curiosity about the dent in my mattress, detoured by a recollection about a party I had been to Saturday evening and by the color choices I had made in a drawing that I had just started. I began wonder about what I would eat for breakfast.
Meditation is like a mysterious structure that you enter into that contains within it every rasa, or flavor of experience. As I wandered through the hallways of my meditation, I ducked under one thought, pushed another one behind a door, and in frustration, was about to exit, when…there it was…my own personal space of meditation. Just when it seemed like an impossibility, I softened, stopped being so hard on myself, let my daily thoughts and distractions rest to the side, and stepped into the unknown.
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The Twenty Minute Compassion Workout
“It’s not, in principle, different from any skill. Instead of going to a gymnasium for fitness, you go to a compassion gymnasium, which is sitting in the morning and, for twenty minutes, bringing love and kindness to your mind...It will raise your baseline.”
— Buddhist monk, Matthieu Ricard, author of Why Meditate, answering the question "why meditate?"
Spirit Guides
The Beauty of Beginnings
It’s officially September. No ocean weekends, roof deck urban sunbathing, or persistent flip-flop wearing can deny it. For many of us, this signifies the bittersweet trailing off of summertime heat – a regretful goodbye to the radiant openness of our bodies that offers us a similarly open state of mind. For others, the transition into September is filled with the excitement of the new – the cooler weather activating our motivation, our work ethic – a shift into focusing and goal setting. So I remind myself at the onset of autumn that this season can be about possibility and freshness, an opportunity to create a new way of thinking, to set new habits, to shift emphasis from something that didn’t serve us to something that holds potential. An opportunity to make our someday into our now.
I begin my autumn by committing to some particular practice for 5 minutes each day. Seriously - 5 minutes.
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That's One Way To Remind Yourself To Meditate
"I was trying to remember the importance of everything and to keep breathing... I want to remember everything I study, to keep up with my meditations and prayers..."
Drew Barrymore, explaining her new temporary tattoo to Dave Letterman.
Scientific
Yoga Meditation Music Calms Cats
And I don't mean cats, as in jive-y jazz lovers. I mean actual cats. A new study in Wales shows that cats in veterinarians offices are significantly calmer, assessed by respiration, eye, and ear activity, when the vet plays yoga meditation music than when the vet leaves the cats and their owners to wait in silence. Further research is necessary to determine whether Kenny G tunes have a similar effect. Don't ever say we don't bring you critical breaking news!
Workout
Sandbox yoga
That's the term my instructor used today to describe the class. We did lots of partner work and just played around for quite a bit with different poses. It was a lot of fun. We did assisted hand stand practice (I got up by myself but wasn't quite as successful as last time since I didn't have that guy coaching me thru it), we did this downward dog to upside down V type shape t
Been stressed? Yeah, a bit...
Ups and downs today.
I went in this morning to see another doctor. My blood pressure was up, as was my RHR at 67 bpm...good results. We talked about the results from when I had the heart rate monitor strapped to me for 24 hours. Everything checked out okay.
"Have you been under any stress lately?"
Yes, I have, in fact.
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You Wrote We Like
Prescription for Yoga Thoughts
Mostly exercise is useful for focusing on "me". We use it to de-stress and calm ourselves, as distraction from gnawing annoyances and of course to lose weight, get in shape and train. But what if we instead channel our energy to focus on "you"?
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Scientific
Dull the Anticipation, Dull the Pain
Studies show that people who meditate are less sensitive to physical pain, but a new study shows that they also experience less emotional angst related to pain. The study, conducted at the University of Manchester, used a painful laser and brain scans to look at the pain-related responses of subjects with a range of meditation experience, from zero experience to decades of practice. Long-term meditators showed extra activity in the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain involved in controlling attention and thought processes, during the anticipation-of-pain part of the experiment. Explaining the findings, the lead author of the study said, "Meditation trains the brain to be more present-focused and therefore to spend less time anticipating future negative events." And apparently less anticipation equals less angst.