My breathing and visualization and relaxation stuff didn’t work very well, to be honest. I realized, while I was trying to use them, that I’ve been holding my breath a lot. I haven’t practiced visualization in some time, and it was difficult to call on the skill when it was so rusty. And methods of relaxation? A glass of wine down the hatch would have had better results that my own efforts.

Someone was doing something to me that I was allowing and that was painful, and in the moment I was severely unpracticed at coping at all. And the most interesting part? I was fighting against it still with my anxiousness.

And I thought, wow. Wow. This is the ol’ universal skillet, hitting me on the head again so that I finally get the point.

How can I set myself up to be better able to breathe in difficult situations? Is there a way to practice and see, in my mind’s eye, a really fantastic outcome here? What do I do to relax my efforts, in this moment, to be more fully present?

Today I read this from Sally Kempton:

I’ve always found Guru Purnima, the full moon day of July, to be a time when both the blessing and the challenge of the Teacher are most fully present, most profoundly available. So today is a great day for inquiry. You might ask yourself, “Where is the inner teacher guiding me now? What is the next edge on my learning curve? How am I serving? How could I be showing up more fully for my life?”

Now, up until today, I had never heard of Guru Purnima. Even after twelve years, yoga is a constant learning curve for me, and teachers and students of yoga are always saying things like this that seem to knock me flat on my rear-end, making me feel awkward and immature. But on the other hand, in these moments there is such contemplation and intensity in the questions that I can’t help snatching them up and wrestling with them for a while.

And back to the vein of honesty, I had been wrestling with those questions anyway. So here is my personal challenge, and I want you to join me. It’s a month-long one.

Let’s find our stability.

No matter what school of yoga you love and are practicing, this is accessible. For instance, in Iyengar yoga, it’s working with an outer spiral of the lower legs and an inner spiral of the upper legs. In Anusara, it’s “shins in, thighs out.” For Ashtangis, it might be working the four corners of the feet to root the pose and engaging mulabandha, effectively organizing the pose. The most beautiful part is this. Figuring out how to stand effectively on our legs gives us legs to stand on.

Imagine.

Practice every day, even if for only five minutes in tadasana or uttanasana. When you start finding your proficiency, switch it up a bit by practicing utkatasana or virabhadrasana II.

I think once I get the hang of it in virabhadrasana II, I just might go back for another one of those deep tissue massages…

Related posts:

1. Yes or nope.
2. Practice. At home.
3. How to order coffee, and the art of non-attachment.

Doesn’t this happen in our practice? We become very attached to our particular style of yoga, the style in which we first became aware of our body and how truly unaware we’d been, and once we learn the language we don’t want to disturb it. I am so guilty of this. I love Ashtanga, but only from Richard’s studio or his teachers. My first yoga classes were taught by an Iyengar teacher, so there’s my alignment with, well, alignment (and Richard has a solid foundation in Iyengar, as well, so I understand him). And over the past few years, I’ve been taking Anusara classes when I can (because a lot of my Ashtangi teacher and student friends connected with it as well). But with other styles, I find that I critique them harshly and quickly ask, “Where did this teacher train?” “What style is this, exactly?”

We become fluent in the particular style that makes sense to us. And sometimes, don’t you think, we can become stuck in the familiarity and the safety of it. We shine there because we trust the system, trust the teacher. Opening up to our own vulnerability, we can really reach deep inside and begin to release our own creativity, our playfulness, our curiosity.

But I must say that when I have taken a class here and there with a teacher or in a style with which I was unfamiliar, I almost always learn something valuable. I hear an alignment cue that is different and opens my body in a new and fascinating way. Sometimes my knowledge becomes challenged by wisdom. And sometimes, the truth is, I don’t like the teaching at all because there’s no good foundation. But always, in reflection, I remember that I am a beginner and revel in that. It’s a fun place to be, this beginning spot, and it’s here that I can taste vairagya, or non-attachment, which is one of the “two core principles on which yoga rests.” It’s the balance of both never giving up and always letting go.

So with that, I raise a grande-soy-no water-chai to you and your own reflecting. Namaste.

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