Bernie Birney: It's About Yoga

Such a Lonely Word

I like to think of myself as an honest person.

Truthful; forthright; candid.  Good words, even words I've received in emails generated by this blog. 

Yoga has its own set of ten commandments and honesty ranks right up there near the top.  It's the second one.  It's that important. 

Must we really be told to be honest?  Being told what to do is sort of a hot button issue for me. I like telling people what to do just a little too much.  I do it for a living:  "Trikonasana.  Step your right foot forward.   Breathe.  Feel the sensation of your feet on your mat, and upon the earth's surface.  Draw strength from your feet up your legs into the core of your pelvis, to cultivate the strength to stand upon your own two feet, etc."

Telling people what to do is fine.  Being told what to do, however--not so much.  I don't cotton to it--pretty much ever.  My typical responses when I suspect someone is trying to control me are, in this order:

1. Hackles up.
2. Howling rage.
3. Rip off head.
4. Eat it. 
5. Rolaid.

(Unless you happen to be my spiritual teacher, in which case, please, please--I am begging--can you, in your supreme wisdom, just tell me what to do?  Pretty please with stevia on top?)

Anyway.

When I practice asana, I don't take my thighs back in alignment because someone tells me to, or because it's the virtuous thing to do.  I do it because it feels good.  It's sensuous.  I get to have the deep recognition, "Yes Ma'am, that has just got to be good for me."

Telling the truth works the same way.  Mostly I'm pretty honest, like I said, but there's a particular part of my life in which I have told some fairly serious lies.  Whoppers that started out as self-deceptions and then grew bigger than just me. 

Being untrue to myself doesn't feel good.  Unwinding the little deceptions, and the big ones, of my own device is terrifying.  I mean, it is really, really scary.  I am just so frigging smoothly persuasive that I can convince myself that my own lies are true. That is not a good thing.  

I can convince myself to maintain the status quo but then I have to live in it.  There's a price for that and it is high. Too high. 

I am so ridiculously fortunate to have had the good luck to literally stumble into the arms of The Handel Group.  They are teaching me how to better recognize, and own, what's true for me. Just last month I whined to my incredible coach, Juliana, who was prodding me on a specific assignment that she'd given me:

"I'm trying."

"I don't believe you," she kindly challenged. 

I was floored.  Not only do my students usually not retort that they don't believe me--although it did happen recently--they generally believe me so much that they take notes during class, writing down what I say in dedicated yoga notebooks. 

I had no idea how to respond to Juliana.  Then I tried to convince her I wasn't lying, so I could remain convinced, but she wouldn't budge. 

Wow. 

I have some work cut out for me but telling the truth feels a lot better than telling lies.  It's one thing to see honesty in a list of yamas and niyamas. It's a whole other thing to learn how to get really clear on what's true for me, and to insistently live from the authenticity of that truth, no matter what. 

It could take some time. 

The Handel Group has a Crash Course coming up, and I can not recommend highly enough that you check it out. 

Telling Your Mind to Shut the Fuck Up

This post is inspired by my friend, the brilliant and incandescent Linda Coletta, owner of Blackbird Yoga. 

(Also, inspired is actually a synonym for stolen.  PotAto; potAHto.)

I wasn't there when she taught an entire yoga class using, "Tell your mind to shut the fuck up!" for a theme but I wish I had been.   I would have totally touched her lotus feet. 

I always feel most at home in tantrika-ville so I'll qualify that, for me, the best reason to tell my mind to shut the fuck up would be because it's not telling me the truth, not telling an empowering narrative, not advocating for me, not serving, and is instead wallowing, blaming, clucking about falling sky and impending doom, and generally up to old, self-deceptive tricks.

My inner rogue vigilante--who has trained in a secret village on a Himalayan mountaintop--and who tells my mind to shut the fuck up, looks something like this:

 

Imagine the possibilities:

Mind:  "Take that risk and you are going to wind up impoverished, alone, naked, and living in a cardboard box on the side of the road without any teeth because you can't afford a dentist."

Rogue Vigilante:  "Shut the fuck up!"

 

Mind:  "It's not really all that bad.  Maybe you should just maintain the status quo..."

Rogue Vigilante:  "Shut the fuck up!"

 

Mind:  "Why not just turn the alarm off instead of getting up to write that book?"

Rogue Vigilante:  "Shut the fuck up!"

 

Mind:  "Maybe you don't still have Celiac Disease.  Maybe it was all a mistake.  Maybe you actually can eat that slice of pizza..."

Rogue Vigilante:  "Shut the fuck up!"

 

Mind:  "So-and-so just does that because he/she has too many responsibilities, is confused, is going through a hard time.  He/she will eventually see the light, come around, and treat you the way you want to be treated.  Tolerate it for now."

Rogue Vigilante:  "Shut the fuck up!"

 

Mind:  "Why even bother finishing this book?  It's never going to get published."

Rogue Vigilante:  "Shut the fuck up!"

 

Like that.

PS:  with very heartfelt thanks to The Handel Group who is teaching me how to tell my mind to shut the fuck up.

File Under Samtosha and Ahimsa ~First Thing Monday. . .

48 hours.

48 delicious hours
in which I plan to lock my To-Do List in a shoebox.
(Note to self #1-
learn to type more quietly.
The List is all knowing. It might HEAR you.)

Now--the relaxing-
let it begin.

Maybe I'll FINALLY unroll my yoga mat
and practice sloth-asana.

Maybe I'll stay in my pajamas, drink endless cups of steaming tea and cruise itunes.
And breakfast-
there will definitely be some form of breakfast involved.
The kind with the buttered toast.

Or what about,
wait for it-
a Gilmore Girls MARATHON?

(Somewhere, out on the golf course,
my husband just experienced the kind of shudder you're supposed to feel when someone walks over
the place where your grave will be.
So if I have ever, in casual conversation, insinuated or unintentionally inferred in any way
that my very manly husband enjoys watching the Gilmore Girls with me, well-
we're clear now, right? Okay?)

Or maybe I'll even venture out of doors
and go pumpkin picking.
No, seriously. Our friends are going.
(Note to self #2- add +1 to Pro column
on, "Living in the Boonies--Pro or Con--List"
very first thing Monday morning
upon removal of list from shoebox.)

If we go pumpkin picking I could bring my camera.
Okay, let's move pumpkin picking up to the top of the list.

No, you don't understand-
I meant the relaxation list.
Come on, don't try to pretend you don't have one?
I'm not buying it for a minute.
I said I wanted to relax
not set the APOCALYPSE in motion!
SERIOUSLY-
GIVE. . .ME. . .BACK. . THAT . . .LIST!)

Kidding.
Mostly kidding.
Really, almost entirely kidding.

Happy Divali.
Happy Pumpkins.
Happy weekend.

Yamas & Niyamas ~ A World of Relationship ~Part 1

I love teaching yoga.

It reminds me to be a student first.

There's no greater motivation for knowing my stuff than knowing that I'll shortly be facing a room full of people who expect me to know what I'm talking about. And if I'm not interested in the material then why in the world should they be? It's what I think Shakespeare meant when he said, "to thine own self be true." If I'm not having fun then there's zero chance that anybody else is.

Here's one lesson that I really take to heart:
good yoga draws things into deeper relationship with one another. So, what if we did that with the yamas (the 5 things you should theoretically be trying not to do) and the niyamas (the 5 things nice yogins endeavor to do)?

The yamas and niyamas are a set of 5 DOs and 5 DON'TS,
kind of like the ten commandments, or like Cosmo,
get it?
Normally they're considered as 2 individual lists of 5,
sort of separate but equal,
but what if we looked at them in a whole new way-
as 5 complementary pairs?

Let's set them side by side and see what happens.

Starting at the top, our first victims are sauca and ahimsa-
purity and non-harm.

While sauca is often thought to mean "cleanliness," my teacher (www.rajanaka.com) translates it, "purity."
It's tempting to think of purity as a sort of cleanliness.
Especially if you come to yoga feeling just a little impure, just a little shy of measuring up to whatever standard it is you think you're supposed to be meeting. If you start out feeling a little sullied then getting clean is a pretty good solution to your problem.

Yoga makes a great all purpose detergent--
it will scrub your heart stainless, press smooth your agitated mind and fold your body neatly.

If that's what you're trying to do.

(And don't get me wrong.
I like a fastidiously aligned yoga mat as much as the next quirky yogin does. Probably more.
Okay, definitely more.
Um, about that protractor in my mat bag. . .)

Of course, it's hard to know just how clean you're going to need to get.
My teacher asks, "When would you finally be pure enough?"
It's easy to turn sauca into an ideal that slips beyond reach just when you think you're getting close.

But what if purity meant something else entirely?
What if it meant being true to one's nature?
What if it meant being true to yourself?
Gold is pure in this way.
It never tarnishes because it never forgets what it is.
Under every condition it remains
gold.

Think of purity as a sort of authenticity,
as an offering that comes freely and ungrudgingly from the heart.
Sauca, as a practice,
is the practice of offering who you really are.

Sauca means to draws us into contemplation,
to invite us to inhabit the inner landscape, to journey inward.
Realistically, to offer the best of yourself, you must first know who you are and what's yours to offer.
Sauca says, "don't worry about which way the wind of popular opinion is blowing or what the world will think of you."
Instead it asks:
"What do you think is sacred?
How will you embody those teachings?
How are you becoming them?
How are they becoming you?
What are you offering to yourself?
What are you offering as yourself?"

Offer yourself the taste of your own yoga before you offer it to anyone else.
Those are words to live by. Take them to heart.
I practice them every time I teach because they're deeply true.

They're just not the ENTIRE truth.

Because, let's face it, if I'm not connecting with my students then there's no yoga happening.
Literally.
If we're not creating connections isn't it all a bit. . .
masturbatory?
And really--
if there's not a connection,
if there's not real yoga happening,
then we might spare ourselves the trouble of coming to class and just stay home.

Home has cookies.

Sauca's complement is ahimsa, non-harm.
Ahimsa, and its companions, the rest of the yamas, remind us that we don't just live in the world within.
There's a real world out there that we share with other people and our words and actions have a real affect on them.

Sauca and ahimsa are reflections of one another.
How likely is it, anyway, that your most authentic desire is to meet your own needs at the expense of anybody and everybody else? If your practice brings you to the conclusion that "hurray for me and screw you" is an appropriate mantra then, well-
you've got bigger fish to fry than we can deal with here today.

Draw sauca and ahimsa into deeper relationship and they remind us that part of who we are inwardly is what we do outwardly. They point to a world of connectivity and relationship that is ours to negotiate.

But it's not ours alone.

What if the yamas and niyamas are inviting us into a paradox?

What if they're asking us to live more responsibly
inwardly AND outwardly AT THE SAME TIME?

What if the yamas and niyamas go hand in hand
and what if, like hearts,
they reveal more about themselves
in relationship with one another?

Tasmai Sri Gurave Namah.