Did you know that it takes the muscles in our body minimally 90 seconds up to 15 minutes to stop firing once we relax and completely stop moving? And sitting on the couch watching TV is not relaxing since our bodies are responding to what we see. When is the last time you sat comfortably, in silence and just closed your eyes for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes? Probably we cannot remember!

Restorative Yoga is the opportunity to allow the body and mind to slow down and then let the nervous system reset itself, sort of like a body reboot. The idea is that you support the body through the use of props (blankets, pillows, bolsters, blocks…) to put all the muscles in flex-sion (rather then extension/tension). Then the muscles do not have to work and the body can relax and allow the nervous system to stop firing.

After studying this practice with Judith Hanson Lasater, Ph.D, PT www.judithlasater.com I have a new sense of center and grounding. I have begun offering 20 minute restorative poses in all of my yoga classes and the response is amazing. People need this yoga! In our world of over stimulation and constant movement, we need to allow our systems time to reset and restore.

Rest and restoration is not the same as sleep. Our bodies have very specific jobs to perform while we sleep so there is a level of activity in the body that happens when we sleep. Sleep is considered a reversible loss of consciousness. During relaxation we remain aware.

Judith taught that there are 3 stages to of Shivasana (Relaxation or as most Yogi’s teach it a 5 minute final relaxation pose at the end of class). Stages; 1.) Physiological - it takes up to 15 minutes to shift from our sympathetic nervous system to our parasympathetic nervous system. We live mostly in our sympathetic mode which increase hormone production, slows down or stops digestion, and other physiological systems (this is fight or flight). Where our Parasympathetic system is concerned with long term physiological needs. 2.) Withdrawal of the senses (Pratyhara)- Our senses trigger reactions in our bodies, sight sound and smells all trigger some form of physical reaction, in restorative yoga we work to limit these senses again to allow the body to be neutral. Judith believes that it is in stage that healing begins and we need at least 5 minutes for that healing to be effective. Judith spoke of the increased studies that are researching Cell Membranes and the effect they have on dis-ease. The Cell membrane is what controls what comes in and goes out and if it is weakened then things can pass in and impact the DNA of our cells. It is believed that relaxation allows these membranes to maintain strength. 3.) A state of non emptiness (Ashunya) its that place we go when we relax deeply, but its not sleep. You only know it when you have come back from it. I have heard many people talk of this after an acupuncture session and they say “I went to that special place”. If you have never experienced this state you are missing out!

Meditation is not restoration - although you may feel meditative in the beginning of relaxation, the various forms of mediation that exist require an active level of participation which often is stimulating, either emotions or thoughts.. Meditation is used to bring about total awareness. Restorative is used to let go and allow the body to heal.

The rest of what I learned at training can be divided into two area’s: how to teach (which is not something I can share here) and how to be our best, genuine selves (these are my words not Judith’s).

What does that mean “how to be our best, genuine selves”? To me it means becoming aware of what we are attached to and learning what makes us happy, sad, fearful, angry and then recognizing that we own those feelings. Others cannot cause us to feel. Our feelings arise inside of us when we want ‘things’ our own way and we don’t get them. In Yoga this is called Attachment. When we start to learn our own stories of attachment (this can be the start of healing old wounds and may require professional support) we become aware and when we become aware we do not need to blame others for our feelings. Once we do that we can become compassionate even with people we do not like, or toward those have harmed us. From compassion all things become possible…even peace on earth

So here are few things that Judith shared that can help us on our own journey into Compassion:
*****Multi-tasking means you do several things poorly, try Uni-tasking; doing one things at a time really well*****

1. Sleep more! Go to bed 30 minutes earlier then you do now - and then do that for the rest of your life. When we deprive ourselves of sleep it is hard to relax and be open, our bodies cannot support our emotions.

2. Listen with all of yourself when another person is talking, (stop multi-tasking) Pay total attention!

3. Allow yourself 20 minutes every day for a Restorative pose, 1 x per week allow yourself 1 hour of restorative poses, 1x per year practice restorative poses everyday for 7 days.

4. Stop giving advice - unless your a CPA - listen to your family, friends or coworkers and let them talk, they already have the answers they need, they just need to talk it out and feel validated by having someone listen actively (that means asking open questions but not advising them what to do)

5. Hear everything that is said to you as…PLEASE or Thank You. You have to translate what you are hearing not as personal to you but what someone is feeling when they are expressing themselves, and don’t get that mixed up with your own insecurities, issues or emotions.

6. Notice when you hear criticism, does it really exist in what is being said or written to you? or are you translating what you hear into criticism - just listen and then when you feel criticized ask yourself is that what they just said? Go back to #5

7. Find a restorative teacher that you are comfortable with and practice restorative yoga. Judith maintains a site listing all the teachers that she as certified. www.restorativeyogateacher

As the promise of heat is in the air with the arrival of Summer on Sunday. Thought I would share my first entry from this training.  Continuing to share another part of my journey in Yoga and the learning I have in my trainings.  This most recent opportunity was to spend almost 14 hours learning from a beautiful energetic and spiritual yogini.  Seane Corn is a woman with experiences not unlike many of us, but who had the opportunity to enter the Yoga world at the boom of Yoga in America and because of her abilities as a teacher and communicator she has become a very popular teacher.  She is aware of this blessing and uses her platform to do good in the world.   If you want to know more about her outreach programs check-out her site at www.seanecorn.com

Entry and reflection on Day 1 training - we did mostly an intense basic practice and so I took very few notes during this session.  Sean did speak about her love of the vinyasa flow style of yoga and the benefits and risks of this style.

Seane explained that the style has no Guru and therefore there is no correct way to teach it.   Understand that  Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, the prominent yogi credited with being a driving force behind the resurgence of Hatha yoga in recent decades, taught the three Guru’s we are familiar with today;   his son T.K.V. Desikachar went on to create a style known as Vini yoga,  B.K.S. Iyengar style of yoga has taken on the name Iyengar and Sri K. Pattabhi Jois developed the style of Ashtanga.   The style of Vinyasa takes liberallly from the three others styles of yoga; Vini, Iyengar, and Ashtanga.   It is a style still in evolution, developing and expanding.

She spoke of the opportunities that we as a yoga community have to become a force of good in the world, joining our energy and becoming political and spiritual leaders in our communities and across the world.

Seane also spoke with sincere concern for the students of vinyasa flow and the need for teachers of this style to become educated on the body as well as the nature of the personality types that are drawn to this style.  Focusing on breath and alignment should be the primary focus and recognizing that we do not need to link 24 poses together on one side to make the class interesting and exciting, and for the safety of the students should not.  She learned this because that is how she started teaching and she saw the impact through injuries in her students.  Recognizing that this is a high energy style and attracts A type personalities who often would rather cut off their arm then go to childs pose or use a block.   As teachers we are obligated to help our  students get the most out of a class for themselves and sometimes that means they need to back off and we have to encourage this thinking in our classes.

The class she taught on Friday evening focused on basic vinyasa flows including the Sun Salute.  As we flowed through the 2 hour class I could not help but keep a watchful eye on one of my students who had come to the Friday night workshop.   I watched as my precious student’s body reacted with poise and grace to the instruction of Seane’s voice and words and after a few flows I was able to let go and focus on my own practice.   I found new depth in each pose as I truly focused on matching the length of my inhalation and exhalation to the timing of the movement.   The humor as we heard Seane helping a student expand in Wheel and the joyous “oh yeah” that sounded as if he was having a minor orgasm, brought a level of comradeship to the room as we all celebrated his new expansion with laughter.  If you have the opportunity to take a class with Seane I highly recommend it.

Stay tune for more on this wonderful weekend!

I thought I would use this note to blog a little about my experience in a recent “training” class I took. The topic was the history of yoga and the presenter was Dr. Douglas Brooks. During the past 10 years I have been a yoga practitioner in the physical sense and somewhat in the spiritual sense. Always looking to go a little deeper and grow my understanding of yoga I saw this fabulous opportunity to listen to one of the experts.

Now I have to say a few things before I proceed so that you can understand what I am sharing, and where it is coming from. 1st - understand that I am a emotional listener. That is to say that I hear what people are saying, I relate to it or not and I remember the impact it had on me. So I am not great at reciting verbatim what people say, I can only share how it impacted me, what thoughts it triggered in me and how I digested the words. So this is in no means a factual recording of what I heard.

2nd - I am not a scholar, I did not finish my collegiate studies, and rarely do I completely understand academic people. Interestingly enough I have had opportunity to get to know some very intelligent people; a poet who won the Pulitzer prize, a Fulbright scholar and several other very accomplished professors. To be honest I often do not understand what they are saying, I just get it from an emotional level. In some ways I am a contradiction. I am a very accomplished person in my “career” having worked my way from a call center position to a Director position reporting to the CIO in the Technology group of my company. And yet I am not a technical person. In this very fact based technology industry, I struggle with facts. I manage a large budget but I am not really good with numbers and math. But some how I seems to exceed at the execution of all of these things. I can’t answer why that it is. It just is. . .take note as this point will come up again.

Soon to the topic at hand - what did I learn?

OK well I can tell there are three major ages of the yoga evolution; vedic, Asedic, and Devotionist. Don’t ask me the year I don’t store that info in my head but it dates back many thousands of years before Christ.

The beginning of the vedic age is understood from some archeological sites found in the Indus Valley, today it is India and Pakistan. The first signs of the Feminine Divine are seen in figurines that have been unearthed.

The world is viewed through three lenses, but there is no good or evil there is just a fluidity between the three; 1.) Alignment-things that aid us to connect with our power. 2.) Indifferent - things that are just here but we may use them but they do not support us or aid us, the example was the trees. And 3.) Demons - Called Asura or anti gods. things like illness, viruses, wild animals who want to eat us. These things can not be destroyed because they are adaptive and change often but they are counter to our interests. These things are challenges that drive us to evolve. We need to relate to them differently.

Belief in Plurality - there is no beginning everything creates everything based on our Asana (Position). Hmmm… interesting that this is the first time the word Asana is introduced and it doesn’t have anything to do with what we do on our Mats today
Friday March 20th - the sweet smell of spring…except it snowed today

Ok so picking up where I left off ASANA…so perhaps that is why most positions are named after something in nature. So when I am in the child’s pose am I able to see the world as a child does, or the cat, or the cow, or the crow??…hmmm think about that next time you get into scorpion (my friend Gina).

The point is that in the first age of yoga we saw ourselves in relationship with the world with evolution as a recursive process that enables us.

The concept of Karma begins as an enactment; doing something in a certain way to get something and rituals that draw us into relationships.
Causality; cause and effect which results in leverage of predictability. In other words if I do x then y will happen every time.
Probability; only a certain level of variables
Consequences; it is the way it is - so where ever you are at this moment IS Karma

Dr. Brooks made the point that if something can only happen once…then it didn’t really happen, this isn’t just a yogic perspective but one that scientists also subscribe to. The only population that doesn’t follow this is the religious sects of today…they rely on “faith”. From a scientific perspective it has to have the possibility to be done again to make it true. This gives me pause, I sometimes refer to myself as unique, odd, different. . .but if I think that I am truly unique… then I didn’t really happen but in reality I am not unique. . .”while I am not you, I am something like you, but I am nothing but you” - another of Dr. Brooks quotes. And yes I had to write those down to be able to quote them back to you verbatim

In this first age the Vedic Philosophy is that we are trying to explain our experiences, with a preoccupation of “how did we get here” and the belief that Karma is the way the world works. So the thoughts and concepts revolve around how we receive the world.

I think I captured this quote accurately in my notes “The world that we experience is the study of our experience of the world”. In other words in the Vedic period the thought was that if we can understand the world we would know what to do. The rituals of the period were basically the technologies of the day.

Dr. Brooks spoke of how the Universe is unraveling into greater complexity - and the 25 / 75 % rule: 75% percent is beyond the horizon as we expand the universe expands and the 75% remains beyond our ability to experience.

It is very interesting and I think in some aspects we can see this in our lives if we look around. For example just look at the recent history of computer science, how it has evolved, what we didn’t know when it started and the possibilities that lay ahead.

Saturday March 21st - my friends are pushing me to finish my blog on this topic

OK - sorry - I had to make some updates to yesterday’s entry - go back and re-read it.

Sticking with the concept of the 25/75 rule; after reading the Bhagavad Gita last year I wrote a paper as part of my Yoga certification and what I took away from that book was very similar to this concept.

Part of what I wrote was “Knowledge has many levels and we do not always know what we think we know. There is always more then what we see. We must be open to the fact that what we think we know might look very different if we shine a brighter light on it. ”

So is there a coincidence that I came to this conclusion before being introduced to the concept or did I always have this knowledge in me? Maybe as the universe continues to expand and increase, and my 25% expands, I will come to know that. . . for now it is beyond the horizon.

But here is another conclusion or theory that was not stated during the discussion but which I came to after days if digesting this information. Dr. Brooks presented the facts of the yogic ages, he did not say if he prescribed to them. But what I feel is that the first age was correct, and the 2nd age was correct, and the 3 age was correct…each one was accurate and true based on the universe at the time. As the universe evolved so did the belief systems and concepts. We cannot look back and judge ignorance or greatness by comparing the past to the current day because the place from where we stand today has changed. Similarly we cannot predict the future because the future will evolve in ways we have no comparison or experience to relate it to. We can only focus on today, and let what we know be open to change and growth as tomorrow becomes today.

OK for some of my friends that might be a little deep . . .if so you might go back to that statement I made earlier about the fact I sometimes am a bit odd and you can reinforce your belief in that statement, or you can choose to open your mind the possibilities.

So by the time we get to the Asdic age we have spent more then half the day and Dr. Brooks began t look at his watch realizing he has a lot to get through and the flow of information picks up rapidly, this decreases my ability to absorb so I have lot less notes in this area. I must say the man has passion that is contagious and since he has spent a lifetime learning this history I can only hope to understand a fraction of it after a 7 hour lecture.

So a move toward the 2nd age and a revolution in thought; we can change the world because we can change ourselves. There is a commitment to disengagement, restraint and disassociating from the world.

The movement to change the inner self is done so to affect the outer world. We see the use of personal power. Since the world is seen as a vicious circle and maybe we don’t want this, we see renunciation of the world in the rituals that are introduced.

But life is also seen as a gift that offers challenges and issues and yoga provides the solution. They are looking to find ways to make life sweet. Muhdra is translated as the yoga of honey. The way of study yoga and the rituals are practiced through discussion. In Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra’s the first versus says “Let us study yoga together with argument.

There was so much more in this area that I just could not absorb, it was after lunch and my mind was heavy with the soup and sandwich in my belly as well as the information on the Vedic age. Perhaps next year I will get more.

So off to the third age, my digestion was nearly complete and I think I found more room to absorb the information, although it was still coming at me like water from a fire hose.

The revolution of the Devotionalists – Karma does not explain everything! There are things that don’t fit. So there is God or Lela (Lela – still not sure of the spelling on this). This is used to explain why things happen that don’t have a Karmic explanation. And Dr. Brooks used the term “Lela happens” you know like we say “shit happens”. Sometime it just is how it is.

On the other hand if Lela happens then anything is possible. But there is still a belief that Karma also exists. So there is cause and effect; Karma, but there is also entanglement; Lela and thought that anything is possible.

One of the students said, “Well isn’t that convenient?” and Dr. Brooks said “Yes but it happens to be true” and then rattled off at least 3 different examples which I am so sorry to say I do not remember. But he did talk about Hurricane Katrina and challenged that all those people had a karmic experience and suggested we look at the possibility that sometimes Lela happens.

In the end he summarized the contrast between Karma and Lela

Karma has Cause and Effect vs. Lela which has Entanglement;
Happens without causal effect
Affects things just by being

Karma has probability vs. Lela which is indeterminate and random
A moving object; you can either know where it is or you can know how fast it is going but not both

Karma has consequences vs. Lela which has no direct relationship
Sometimes you just have the “lucky”

Lela can also be defined by the thought that we are free Beings that must choose bondage.

So the Devotionalists believe that there is no purpose, no goal, no attainment. Karma ties us together; you / me, this / that, here / there. Lela is what is in the middle.

A question was asked about how this relates to Dharma (often defined as our purpose). The answer was more then I could absorb .

He spoke about the belief that we are born to a yogic life and some are more advantaged to understand the ways of yoga then others. But he contrasted that with the rajanaka view that everyone is sufficiently able to attain joy no one is karmically advantaged.

In the rajanaka view we are not alone, there is a collective awakening but still there is no goal to be attained. All of us have what we need but we also have each other. Awakening is a process not a destination.

This concept takes me back to the paper I wrote last year and one of the things I came to believe.
“I have come to believe that we are already in possession of all the knowledge that we need. At some level in some dark corner of our minds all the answers exist. We are “enlightened” by the encounters we have; people, situations or challenges shine a light into a dark corner of our inner self to reveal knowledge. The path resides within us and when we see the truth we discover it was always there, with in us waiting to be seen.
But I believe that we need others to find the truth. So it’s like a man who has misplaced his eye glasses. He searches everywhere and cannot find them. After sometime searching he gazes into the mirror only to realize that his glasses were on top of his head the whole time.
Other people in our lives act as the mirror, reflecting what is already there. They help us to discover what is already there with in us. If we choose not to look into the mirror no one can make us. It’s a choice to use each encounter, each happy moment, each difficult moment as a mirror. What do we see? What do we know? Only we can answer these questions.”

In the end Dr. Brooks challenged us to see that life isn’t a problem to solve, it is a paradox to live. He explained that a Guru is a grace dispensing force and is simply defined as the matter at hand. For example when we are at a funeral, death is the matter at hand that is what we are to be learning from.

He also challenged us to look beyond what is being said, question, challenge and continue to study and learn. Ask yourself if people are coming from a Karmic perspective or a Lelic perspective. The other important advice he shared was to be authentic in what ever we do, but pointed to the fact that we have many selves and we should allow ourselves to be authentic in each of those selves.

I think that perhaps this is the end of my Blog on this topic, but not the end of my journey.

And if you are interested in this topic and want more factual info go to Dr. Brooks blog at rajanaka.blogspot.com

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