http://gratificationdeferred.blogspot.com/

about my experiences with going back to school. Since I'm in school, I pretty much only have time for the one blog, and since I decided it needed its own page, you can think of it as a continuation of this stream of consciousness, only over somewhere else. Just click through as if nothing has happened.

This time of year I also hear myself and other yoga teachers talking in class about taking the time to feel grateful for all the blessings in our lives. This is also both well and true. Whenever I have the first inklings that I want to throw myself a little pity party, I list the first five things that come to my mind that I am grateful for in my life.

But to be honest, sometimes it’s easy to breeze right through thoughts like “I’m grateful for my health” or “I’m grateful that I have a roof over my head and food to eat.” Of course I am grateful for all of those things, but when it comes to soothing my soul, they aren’t always the most effective.

On the other hand, something that works every single time for me, that stops any doldrums or envy dead in its tracks, is celebrating the success or joy of those around me, and being grateful that I get to witness it.

For example, look at these two people:

Look how happy they are. They took this picture right after getting engaged to each other. Just looking at this picture makes me happy, because I get to witness what joy they bring to each other. Celebrating with them puts all self-centered thoughts well out of reach and replaces them with a straight shot of pure joy. Even if you don’t know them – aren’t you happier now for seeing this picture of people in love?

So when you’re making your list of things you’re grateful for this year – see what happens if you shift it up a little and look at the people around you. Find something positive, or affirming, or even simply a learning experience that has happened for a loved one and let yourself feel grateful that they had this experience. I bet you anything it will send your pity party packing.

 Happy Thanksgiving!

[I know of at least one other yoga teacher this has happened to, and all I can say to these scammers is: dudes, we’re generally not the wealthiest. You might want to finesse your target.]

So I was primed to be suspicious when I received this email the other day:

Subject: Just following up: the Sound Asleep pillow STILL rocks

[I have to interject here to note that this was the first email I had received on the subject.]

Hi Sarah,

Just wanted to touch base with you on my email from last week regarding the Sound Asleep Comfort pillow. We’d really love to send a free product sample your way for review consideration on your health blog, Sarah Court yoga.
In case we weren’t clear on our first email, the Sound Asleep comfort pillow comes with a built-in speaker that will play sound from your portable music device – but feels just as comfortable as any other pillow you have on the bed already!

[Something about that entire sentence cracks me up. Like it says, “It may sound uncomfortable to try and fall asleep with a speaker under your head, but it’s really delightful, if you didn’t get that from our first email – which we didn’t actually send to you!”]

This is going to be a very popular new product that will make bedtimes easier for kids and also for adults who might have trouble sleeping. We know, it’s hard to believe something like this exists but that’s why we can’t wait for you to test-nap it for yourself. Please let me know if I can send one your way today! 

As it turns out, this email was neither Swiss nor Japanese but in fact real. To be on the safe side, I gave them the address of a studio where I teach to send me the pillow. I also said very, very clearly that although they were free to send me a pillow, I doubted that I would review it. That was apparently fine with them, as I am now in possession of said pillow.

This is not going to be a pillow review piece, in large part because the pillow is still sitting unopened in my living room. Somehow I can’t bring myself to try it, not because I think it’s necessarily a bad product (although I do wonder why the speaker needs to be IN your ear and not just next to the bed). It’s just that I find it odd to be in a position of product review. I know it’s not unusual for bloggers, and it makes me feel like I should play along and be more mercenary-minded and see what else I could get. But that’s not what this space is for, and I don’t think it’s why any of you read this.

So here we go:

Dear Sound Asleep people,

Thank you for sending me one of your pillows, even though I was very ornery about whether or not I would even review it. Your willingness to give me one anyway is lovely. After a certain amount of wrestling with the idea, I’m choosing not to review it on my site, because I don’t feel that product reviews of anything are in line with my goals for my blog. Perhaps this is foolish and I should get with the program and start accumulating free stuff. But as my teacher Sharon Gannon used to say, “You get more stuff, and then you just have more stuff you need to clean.” I’m giving the pillow to my brother: if he gives me any sort of review, I’ll let you know.

Sincerely,

Sarah

This blog is not an afterthought. This blog is my firstborn. Well, technically, this blog is my firstborn, but let's not split hairs. Suffice to say: I am writing things. They will go up. On this blog here. When will that happen? That is an excellent question. In the meantime: I have not forgotten you, my three blog readers. Funny things have happened. You will be reading about them soon. If you would rather not be checking the blog to see if I've done it, you can subscribe over on the right and you'll get an email from me when it's happened.

Thank you for reading along. There are more of you than I ever thought there would be. I haven't forgotten you!!

For me, a huge revelation has been the nervous system, the fascinating tangle of fibers that run through the human body and telegraph messages to and from the brain. In my mind, all nerves were small, thin strands that were barely perceivable to the naked eye – but the reality is completely different. Watching Gil Hedley move the piriformis (one of the external rotator muscles located in your butt) to reveal the sciatic nerve beneath, I literally gasped. The nerve was as thick as your pinkie finger, and there was nothing delicate about it. I saw it again a few weeks ago at the Bodies exhibit in Las Vegas (and tried to have a bonding moment with the lab-coated woman standing nearby, who refused to be drawn into my excitement about the size of the sciatic nerve and merely replied, “yes, sometimes nerves are large.”). For those of you who have suffered some form of sciatica, in which the nerve has been impinged upon by an inflamed muscle fiber, and thus find it intolerable to sit or stand or walk, well, no wonder: that nerve is huge, and it’s been hurt.

PT extraordinare Sean Hampton told us in YTU training a year ago that it’s not just the muscles that need stretching, the nerves need it too. It makes total sense: the tissues of the body do not exist in distinct, separate vacuums from each other, but affect and impact each other directly. Constant, passive contraction in a muscle leads to adaptive shortening, and it only follows that the nerves running through that area would also have shortened and suffered as a result.

One of my favorite stretches that I do almost daily is to combat a new environmental stress that I never had to deal with in New York: driving! All that gripping of the steering wheel is creating tension in my forearms and hands. Yuck. Here’s what I do now (of course, courtesy of Yoga Tune Up®):

If you want to try this, make sure your scapula stays down – don’t let it hike up into your ear. For bonus points, attempt to drag your hand along the wall without actually moving – you’ll engage the forearm flexors, anterior deltoid, and pecs for a deeper stretch. You will probably feel this as a tingling in your palms, inner elbows, and/or across the chest. It’s a delicious awakening for the brachial plexus (the nerves that run from your neck down into your chest and arms).

(You totally want one for yourself. Get it at www.imatoy.com.)

As small children, we learn self-soothing, the ability to calm ourselves down when we are upset. At a young age we need self-soothing primarily so that we can go to sleep without help from parents, but it is also an important skill to learn for life. Self-soothing allows us to successfully negotiate emotional landmines as we get older and can no longer cry for mom to come and fix the problem or take the pain away.

Some of us learn healthy self-soothing techniques as a child and are able to implement them as an adult. Many of us do not, and turn to substances outside ourselves to try and take the pain away, be it food, alcohol, drugs, or sex. Still others rely on those around them to step in and heal the hurt, and are continually disappointed when those needs aren’t met.

One of my favorite superheroes, Wolverine, has the ability to heal himself when physically wounded by regenerating skin, bone and muscle as if the injury never happened. This may not be possible for us ordinary humans, but as adults we can learn self-soothing skills we may not have had the opportunity to learn as children. The philosophy of yoga says, again and again, that the answers to our biggest questions will not be found outside of ourselves, but that only by looking inside will we come into contact with the peace and truth that we need. Successful self-soothing in times of distress are exactly that ability to find peace and truth below the turmoil.

The Hindu pantheon is filled with gods and goddesses – the original superheroes – performing amazing feats of bravery and self-sacrifice. Hanuman, the monkey god, leaps across the ocean to Lanka to save the kidnapped Princess Sita. That same Sita, when her loyalty is questioned, walks through fire to prove her trustworthiness and emerges unscathed. These acts are performed from an unwavering closeness to center, not from a place of self-doubt, fear, or attachment to pain. Of course, it is unlikely that we will ever be able to fly without an airplane or be left unburned by fire, but these are just metaphors for the bravery and strength we all possess.  We can be superheroes when we allow the truth at our center to come to the surface and soothe our pain, like balm to a burn.

This is not to say that we cannot ask our friends for support, advice, or help. It would be unwise to never allow ourselves to be vulnerable to others out of fear of pain or suffering – in fact the etymology of the word vulnerable is wounded – but the healing of our own wounds is something we must address on our own. In the end, we’re on this journey of life with just ourselves, and by reminding ourselves that we are our own greatest source of strength, clarity and love, we are well on the way to living as the superheroes that we all are.

“We can be heroes, just for one day.” – David Bowie

 “Our parents raise us to the best of their ability; we must raise ourselves the rest of the way.” – Manorama 

It didn’t seem out of place for the teacher to bring philosophy into an asana class, and I have since taught many classes that way myself. The practice of yoga is an integration of art and science. As such, it is completely appropriate to approach yoga with the goal of increasing awareness of both your physical habits (through pose adjustments from the teacher to prevent unhealthy patterns) and your mental ones (when the teacher uses yoga philosophy to illustrate a real life experience).

It strikes me as strange, however, that with all the different styles of yoga that are out there, it’s rare to hear a yoga teacher talk about muscles in the classroom. I don’t mean basic alignment cues, as in how much to bend your knee in Warrior 2, or to ground down through your big toe mound in Trikonasana (admit it: you’ve said that one. I have too). I mean actual names of the muscles that the students are using in their bodies at that very moment. Why is this?

I will admit, when I took my first teacher training, the anatomy module was an impregnable fortress of Latin surrounded by putrid swamplands of kinesiology, and I was miserable and confused. Over the years however, and in particular through studying with Jill Miller this past year, my teaching has changed to encompass as much anatomy as I can get away with, because I believe that physiology is as important to communicate to students as philosophy. 

Here’s an example from my class a few days ago: when in Warrior 2 pose, the abducted position of the arms requires two muscles to hold them in place, the deltoids and the supraspinatus. I don’t expect students to already know what or where these muscles are, but I respect them enough to know that they are intelligent and capable of learning by embodying this anatomy themselves, considering they all have bodies to practice with. So I turned around and touched the two muscles on my own shoulder and upper back, and I also demonstrated what commonly happens when the muscles that raise the shoulderblades are unnecessarily contracted as well.

I asked the students to lower their arms, and then with this new knowledge that they had acquired, to raise their arms to shoulder height again using only the two muscles they needed. Fourteen demonstrations of efficient shoulder movement followed, and it made me very, very happy. Will they remember the muscle names? Perhaps, or perhaps not, but they now know it has nothing to do with their neck, and I think they’ll remember that at least. This doesn’t have to live in a vacuum from teaching yoga philosophy, either: when I use that demonstration again (and please, use it too in your own class!) I could even tie it into one of the kleshas, and talk about having attachments to too many things when we can often do what we need with less.

I’m not saying that your flow class has to completely change into an Iyengar-style picking apart of every single pose, but I think taking a few moments here and there to impart some of your study of the body would be invaluable. And if you’re thinking to yourself “But all the muscle names are Latin, and they don’t speak Latin,” I would remind you that none of them speak Sanskrit either, and yet they have learned all the Sanskrit pose names through your repetition, as well as probably several other words that are practically ubiquitous at this point (Namaste, anyone?).

Yoga is a practice of embodiment. The human body is a humbling structure full of stunning, brilliant architecture. Why shouldn’t we learn and teach as much as we can of it to our students? Why shouldn’t students of yoga know as much as their gym-going counterparts, so that they can practice intelligently and avoid injury? Why shouldn’t we as teachers take it upon ourselves to continue learning, to hold ourselves to a higher standard than what is currently required of us (especially since future legislation will likely raise that standard anyway)? Why not, since we are working with people’s bodies, and in a therapeutic capacity, train to the level of a physical therapist? The worst thing that could happen? You might be mistaken for one.

Last week I was in the yoga room at the gym, chatting with a regular student who always shows up a few minutes early, setting up my music, lowering the lights – all run-of-the-mill stuff for a Monday night – when suddenly the door burst open and a sweaty man strode in. Assuming he was there for class, I asked him to please leave his sneakers outside, but he was too engrossed in his iPod to hear me. Without breaking stride, and without acknowledging anyone else, he marched across the room, opened the side door, and left. I had a moment of total confusion before I realized that he had used the room as a shortcut to get to the bathroom on the other side (In sneakers! The horror!) instead of walking around the room.

When you’re at a yoga studio, for the most part, students are aware of good yoga etiquette: don’t barge in during OM, turn your phone off, take off your shoes, make space for other students – the kinds of things that if you don’t already know, others will educate you about pretty quickly. It’s all in service of one idea, which is to be aware of yourself and how your behavior affects those around you, and to create a space that is sacred. However, sometimes this gets lost in translation when the yoga class moves to a different location.

This is not a rant about someone who dared to march through the sacred yoga space: this man was, in his mind, taking the most direct route to the bathroom, through a room that he probably assumed was just an empty workout studio. So it would be unfair to judge him for not knowing the customs that surround the practice of yoga. But it did get me thinking about my own blind spots, and where in my own life I lose awareness. It’s relatively easy to be present and considerate and compassionate, all those things that come through from our higher nature, when we’re surrounded by people who are doing the same. But what about the other 22 ½ hours of the day?

My not-so-compassionate self comes out when I’m driving. I’m going to blame this on my dad, who likes to yell at other drivers (“You, Dad! I learned it from watching you!”) and so set the tone for me. Generally speaking, I refrain from yelling, but I do enjoy creating a heavily sarcastic running commentary of the driving skills of those around me (sample dialogue: “Oh, so pulling in front of me without using your blinker and then slowing down seems like the right thing to do right now? Really!”) While none of them (fortunately) can hear me while I’m doing this, it certainly doesn’t create a serene state of mind for me, and is often followed by my own self-dialogue (“Wow, again with the talking to the other drivers. This does not serve you in any way.”) I take a little consolation in the fact that I do catch myself in the act, but I would rather get to a place where I don’t lose that much awareness.

So this is my question to you: where are your blind spots? And if you’re thinking to yourself, “If I knew what they were, they wouldn’t be blind spots!” then maybe it’s time to practice a little self-awareness as you move through your day. Does someone you work with make you nuts? Do you find yourself behaving poorly when confronted with certain situations? Can we all, maybe, start to expand our idea of where the yoga class ends, so that when we leave the classroom or the studio and walk out into the world, we continue to behave as if we were still there? Maybe if we trick our brains into considering the whole world as a yoga studio, we won’t have to work so hard at trying to stay self-aware! 

Purnam Adah

Purnam Idam

Purnat Purnam Udacyate

Purnasya Purnamadayah

Purnameva Vasisyate

That Fullness

This Fullness

Fullness unto Fullness

Fullness emerging from Fullness

Fullness indeed remains

The mantra reminds us that right here, right now, in every moment, fullness, completeness, wholeness is available to us. There is no greater richness than the ability to be in the present moment with whatever is taking place, whether we perceive it as good or bad, positive or negative, joyous or painful. Those labels that we consciously or unconsciously use to qualify our experiences disappear at the moment that we are able to come into the present moment and be there fully. Greater richness is not waiting for us next year, regardless of the state of our personal finances. There is not a more complete experience to be had later down the line when we are married, or in our dream job, or having a baby – while these can all be positive, rewarding, exciting experiences, they will inevitably disappoint if we do not bring our own fullness to begin with.

This is all very easy for me to regurgitate from the canon of yoga teachings, but what about the reality of trying to make it happen? If our minds are habitually navigating the past or the future and truly challenged by the idea of spending time in the present, then what are we supposed to do?

The answer, according to yoga, is practice. Now this practice may have to begin, for someone whose mind is deeply distracted or agitated, with taking a walk or some other physical activity. Our attention is so constantly drawn away from the here and now – and as a society, we are so actively encouraged away from the present – that for some people, the practice of sitting still that is an integral part of meditation is initially inaccessible. This doesn’t mean that they are beyond capable of getting there, but at first, the nervous system needs quieting. This was what the asana part of yoga was originally designed for – to release tension from the body and mind in order that we might be less distracted. 

When you feel you are ready, the practice becomes sitting quietly and breathing, without concerning yourself with doing anything. (Again, so easy to describe, yet far more challenging to do!) Feel how in that quiet, there is nothing wrong – as Shri Brahmananda Sarasvati described yoga, nothing is missing. There may be circumstances in our life that are upregulating our sympathetic nervous system (or in other words, bothering us) but with practice, we can learn to separate out the conditions of our world from the condition of our mind. The greatest satisfaction we will ever experience is right here, right now. If we can feel that: even for a millisecond – even just for the moment of reading that sentence – we are well on our way to being richer than we think.

[Mantra translation by Professor John L Griffin from his essay “A Consideration of Divinity & Consciousness 
With Qualities (Saguna) & Beyond Qualities (Nirguna), 
Focusing on Shiva as a Primary Mediating Symbol 
In the Process of Self-Realization”]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FtSP-tkSug

(Contains cadavers. You have been warned! Also contains Gil Hedley, my new geek crush.*)

What keeps me constantly engaged as a teacher and practitioner of yoga is the endless stream of proof that the body and the mind are not unrelated. As much we tend to walk around as what I like to call “a brain on a stick,” sending messages from the brain to control the body, without considering what the body might need (like sitting in front of a computer for hours on end), it is an unavoidable fact that our mental, emotional, psychological content (which manifests as electrical signals inside the brain and spinal column) directly impacts our bodies, our behaviors, our habits, even the way we walk down the street. I think Gil demonstrates this beautifully when he describes how he used to be a very still person until he realized the negative impact it was having on his body.

The mind-body relationship runs not only from brain to body (“I am a still person, therefore I will not move my limbs”) but from body back to brain as well – as the ‘fuzz’ builds, and our mobility is compromised, so do our attitudes stiffen and our interactions with the world around us decrease in flexibility. The grumpy old man stereotype exists for a reason!

More often than not, when I meet someone and tell them I’m a yoga teacher, their immediate response is “Oh, I’m not flexible at all!” This oddly confessional outburst usually makes me smile – after all, I’m not there to judge someone if they can’t touch their toes – but I think it overlies a deeper held belief. It is fuzzy logic to decide we are something, when that something we decide that we are can change. Obviously there are certain things that are immutable about us – even if I were to dye my hair black, it would continue to grow out red (more and more white, actually), but our ability to find movement and space in our joints is not one of them. Yoga practices remind us of this again and again by returning us to that spaciousness within using a variety of techniques for both body and mind. Our job is to hold on to that spaciousness, keep room within ourselves, so that we continue to reside in a state not of being any one inflexible thing, but simply of being.

“Attachment to views is the greatest impediment to the spiritual path.” – Thich Nhat Hanh

*geek crush: when you have a crush on someone’s skills, talent, brains.