Kripalu Yoga Teacher Training in DC

I've had a number of people from retreats and classes ask about the style of movement I lead. I spent almost 25 years immersed into the world of Kripalu Yoga as a practitioner and trainer and find the style is still a great match for me. Kripalu Yoga is about balance. How do you cultivate that delicate balance where you are here and now, grounded in your body as well as with a clear and open heart and mind?

That's what the practice is all about and as I say, "Kripalu Yoga is not about what you look like from the outside. It's all about what's happening inside.' This is a very intuitive form of movement and a powerful adjunct to meditation.

My friend and colleague Jovinna Chan will be leading a 200-hour Kripalu Yoga Teacher Training at Dream Yoga Studio in McLean, VA.

I'll be supporting the training from the perspective of teaching meditation and look forward to teaching again with Jovinna.

She'll be leading a daylong retreat on both December 8th and 9th and will have session for those interested in Kripalu Yoga and the training.

For more on the retreat and training    For more on Jovinna

Manipulating Time

Time is relative, usually in relationship to how much we are enjoying or not enjoying what's happening. One great thing about meditation is that you can deconstruct your internal response to what is happening rather than be caught up in reactivity.

Imagine being able to manipulate time with technology:

The Decelerator Helmet - A slow motion for Real Life from Lorenz Potthast on Vimeo.

The VMR

If you have done a number of longer, intensive Buddhist retreats you have most probably experienced the VMR. The VMR is a Vipassana Retreat Romance. It is entirely possible to discover, woo, marry, have children and divorce another person… without ever speaking to them.

An example:

The 'Power' of Retreat

 

Before the lights went out.

You would think 75 people hanging out in basically one room with no showers for four days and with their bedrooms essentially the same temperature as the outdoors would create some disharmony. In our weeklong fall retreat, we rode out the hurricane in shared silence and mutual support.

If anything, the sense of camaraderie  and interconnectedness helped each of us draw deeply inside and keep our hearts open.  Serving a retreat is quite engaging, leading the movement sessions, giving talks and doing about ten interviews a day.  This vantage point not only helps me sense the trajectory of individual transformations, but the evolution of the group as a whole.

I wanted to pass along a reading, as promised.  This was part of my talk on "Embodied Presence," how we receive signals all the time from our bodies wanting attention and promising a deeper, more intimate connection with life.

This, I believe, was written by a Chinese doctor:

Felt Sense Prayer

I am the pain in your head, the knot in your stomach, the unspoken grief in your smile. I am your high blood sugar, your elevated blood pressure, your fear of challenge, your lack of trust. I am your hot flashes, your cold hands and feet, your agitation and your fatigue. I am your shortness of breath, your fragile low back, the cramp in you r neck, the despair in your sigh. I am the pressure on your heart, the pain down your arm, your bloated abdomen, your constant hunger. I am where you hurt, the fear that persists, your sadness of dreams unfulfilled. I am your symptoms, the causes of your concern, the signs of imbalance, your condition of dis-ease.

You tend to disown me, suppress me, ignore me, inflate me, coddle me, condemn me. I am not coming forth for myself as I am not separate from all that is you. I come to garner your attention, to enjoin your embrace so I can reveal my secrets. I have only your best interests at heart as I seek health and wholeness by simply announcing myself.

You usually want me to go away immediately, to disappear, to sleek back into obscurity. You mostly are irritated or frightened and many times shocked by my arrival. From this stance you medicate in order to eradicate me. Ignoring me, not exploring me, is your preferred response. More times than not I am only the most recent notes of a long symphony, the most evident branches of roots that have been challenged for seasons.Hread

So I implore you, I am a messenger with good news, as disturbing as I can be at times. I am wanting to guide you back to those tender places in yourself, the place where you can hold yourself with compassion and honesty. If you look beyond my appearance you may find that I am a voice from your soul. Calling to you from places deep within that seek your conscious alignment.

I may ask you to alter your diet, get more sleep, exercise regularly, breathe more consciously. I might encourage you to see a vaster reality and worry less about the day to day fluctuations of life. I may ask you to explore the bonds and the wounds of your relationships. I may remind you to be more generous and expansive or to attend to protecting your heart from insult. I might have you laugh more, spend more time in nature, eat when you are hungry and less when pained or bored, spend time every day, if only for a few minutes, being still.

Wherever I lead you, my hope is that you will realize that success will not be measured by my eradication, but by the shift in the internal landscape from which I emerge.

I am your friend, not your enemy. I have no desire to bring pain and suffering into your life. I am simply tugging at your sleeve, too long immune to gentle nudges. I desire for you to allow me to speak to you in a way that enlivens your higher instincts for self care. My charge is to energize you to listen to me with the sensitive ear and heart of a mother attending to her precious baby.

You are a being so vast, so complex, with amazing capacities for self-regulation and healing. Let me be one of the harbingers that lead you to the mysterious core of your being where insight and wisdom are naturally available when called upon with a sincere heart.

Passing Through

A lone Swan with Canada Geese, early morning.

Concentration, Mindfulness and the Arising of Insight

Concentration is power.

A concentrated mind can plow through obstacles to get a project done. In the same way, concentration helps you move through challenging mental and emotional states and remain deeply and fully present.

Mindfulness is non-judging awareness.

Mindfulness reveals how you are holding your experience and ultimately, how you can let it go.

In a sense these are two opposing energies. One is a willful practice while the other calls on patience and a quality of surrender. This week's guided meditation and talk explores the dance of these two elements and the end result: seeing into the nature of reality and the arising of insight.

Podcast here and online streaming here.

The Colors

Here's the color part of the equation:

Mornings

Just a wonderful contrast between the gray wet fog each morning and the emerging colors.  Here's the grey, wet fog part:

This week's talk is called "Mindfulness of Thoughts:  With Your Thoughts You Create Your World."  One of the best things about the practice of meditation is that we don't quite believe our thoughts as much as before. We begin to see the difference between being caught in the narrative - the ongoing story - and the direct experience of the Here and Now. Simple and ridiculously profound.  iTunes podcast here and online streaming here.

This Weekend: The Questions That Heal and Set You Free: A Training in Body-Centered Inquiry

 

I'm looking forward to this Saturday's daylong retreat I'll be leading in Bethesda on a topic near and dear to me:

The Questions that Heal and Set You Free:

A Training in Body-Centered Inquiry

What if you could develop a consistent and reliable way to receive guidance from a deeper level than the thinking mind?  

We'll be exploring this topic through short talks and presentations, guided experiences, discussion and sharing.

There is a wonderful statement out there that says "The body never lies."  As far as I can tell, that's true.  Your mind may tell you one thing, but if you really listen internally there is usually a 'felt sense' of what resonates as true.

How do you access that sense of kinesthetic intuition?   We'll do it exploring three separate disciplines:

• Insight (Vipassana) Meditation develops your capacity to pause, recognize what is present and see with increasing clarity into the nature of things.

• Focusing is a mind-body training that helps you be intimately present to direct experience and cultivate new ways of being present.

• Inquiry helps you access intuition and directs your attention to new possibilities.

The day will be a balance of internally focused disciplines of meditation and reflecting writing and exploration through what I call 'inter-personal meditation' and group discussion.

Body-Centered Inquiry is a profound way to untangle knotty issues, explore new possibilities and make important decisions in your life.

Bring an issue you've been wrestling with and we'll see what your body has to say about it.

Follow this link for more information and to register online.

Meditation and a Talk on Working with the Hindrances

This week's topic was "Working with the Hindrances," which I hope is a pragmatic approach to navigating the challenging weather systems of the mind.

The talk, given on Capitol Hill, is proceeded by a meditation on the senses, exploring how you can be intimately present to sensation while observing what is changing and how you are holding your experience.

Available (for free!) on my podcast or streaming online.

Water

I can see why paddleboarding is such a popular sport. It's relatively easy to learn, but the curve to proficiency is immensely challenging depending on conditions. On Saturday we started from Penney Lock, on the Maryland side of Potomac. Some fishermen coming in told us to be careful, because the wind was gusting over 15 miles an hour. Paddling first under a stone underpass, we came out into amazing conditions. The wind was whipping straight down river.  As we turned our noses up river, we had an amazing battle.

When the wind abated I made some progress but as soon as it picked up again I was stopped dead. Nonetheless, we made our way to the base of Seneca Breaks, a granite escarpment with lots of whitewater.

One hour of hard paddling upriver was followed by about a 20 minutes return trying to stay upright with the wind flat at our backs. Way cool.

On the Board Again

I never skate-boarded, surfed, unicycled or did much of anything in balancing sports, so I felt a bit cautious about stand up paddle-boarding. Being a tad over 6'5" and legs like a stork didn't seem much in my favor either. "Use it or lose it," I thought, so I've taken to the board and love this way of being on the water. I'm not hanging ten or anything yet, but I've only fallen in once so far.

New Talks

I've got a few things up on itunes and available for download from class this week at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Arlington:  A guided meditation with the classic instructions on 'Contemplation of Breath' and a talk I've titled "The Five Hindrances and Who You Really Are." You can get them through iTunes or stream them here.

Happy For No Reason: Puppy Attack

Back in the Saddle Again

Weekly classes are rolling again. This week I gave the first talk  of the new season ("Stripping It Down to the Essence: The Four Noble Truths")  at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington. It was great to gather again after a long and weird summer.

My talk is now online, either through my iTunes podcast or streaming directly online.

The audio quality is vastly improved thanks to my new microphone. Geek Alert:   I have to say I'm quite impressed with the new Apogee MiC Microphone.  It far outshines any other microphone I've used on my portable devices, and I've tried many.  It's pricey, but I now have no regrets.  I record on the iPhone or iPad using iTalk, then edit in GarageBand on my my mac.  I don't need to do much post-processing at all now.

You Can Go Home Again

I periodically get up to Pennsylvania to stay with my brother and his wife and visit my dad, who is in an Alzheimer's unit. It's always a poignant time and on the way there I get to cruise through the area where I was born and raised - in the heart of the Pennsylvania Dutch country. I grew up on an incredibly beautiful farm set back on what is still a dirt road. The barn was built in 1740 and the house not long after. My parents bought the farm the year I was born and eventually gave it up when it became too much to manage – about 40 years later.

Last week I left Washington, DC in the late afternoon, rolled into a neighbor's farm about 11:30PM and crawled into the back of my Honda Element, where I had my sleeping quarters all set up.

Before dawn I woke up and wandered around the farm with my camera for much of the morning.  I'll post some of the shots on my site as I get them edited.

This was a working farm, with a smoke house, chicken coops and while the barn never had running water, it's housed many generations of cows, sheep and pigs.  We had as many as 45 sheep and multiple horses, chickens, quail, geese, cats, dogs, rescued raccoons and hawks.

Gathering of the Clan

Every evening a group of egrets gather together to see through the night. It's always been a challenge to capture them in low light but last weekend we floated by in the kayak with me holding the long lens as still as possible.

Time is Running Out

The spiders seem to sense their time is running out around this time of year and the webs start getting more spectacular.  

The Mind Business

We've got 60 teachers-in-training at the Meditation Teacher Training Institute heading into their second year.  I'm excited at the prospect of these talented, inspired teachers being unleashed. Some are drawn to prison work, some to work with adolescents and many to serve in the corporate arena.  I've always inspired when I go into the workplace to offer strategies for transforming stress.

Here is great article on mindfulness at work and how it's truly taking off these days.

(Thanks, Tony.)