My Shoulder Hurts

And, after much deduction, I think it's because I was trying to show off to my brother all my cool yoga moves and I tried to do a forearm stand without warming up.

Because I'm an idiot. Apparently.

3 Ways of Practice

I am returned from my trip!

I did not write while there...my apologies. But, I am delighted to see that I have new readers here in Shanti Town in the meantime...welcome! I love you! (Seriously. I love you.)

My practice was minimal while away...a few stolen moments in the mornings at P.'s parents house, a beautiful vigorous practice on the cold wet deck of a shared house on the Oregon Coast (thank you, Heidi), and another on a different deck, this one shaded with fat green trees, watched by a white cat with wide eyes, in a beautiful house in Seattle. This last practice may have been my favorite...the air was warm but full of breezes, music quietly seeped from the outdoor speakers, and I felt--on the warm plank wood of the deck--that I was both indoors and out, and with P. and Jos working just on the other side of the windows, both solitary and with company (this, like taking a nap in the middle of the day when someone else is home and awake) being one of my favorite kinds of feelings...and every time I bent backwards, I could look up to see the sky covered with trees...

The trip, like these three practices, was broken into three major parts: A week at P's parents house in Eugene (where I stole bits of practice before the house was awake), several days on the Oregon coast (where Heidi and I practiced in the damp air of the morning), and our last week in Seattle (where I did backbends on the deck in Seattle with its fat cat and fat trees)...and I have to wonder if the practice matched the place...?

Perhaps it is right that the quiet solitude and spaciousness of the house in Eugene--itself standing solitary amidst acres of farmland, down a long dusty road to the peace of it--inspired a silent solitary practice, stolen on the gray rug that carpeted our bedroom. I remember how much my back ached that first day when I bent forward into a gentle seated practice, how I could feel all the muscles around all my vertebrae begin to stretch and call out, and how much patience I felt I had for my practice...the space to lean forward and rest my head in the cups of my turned out ankles...bereft of my usual need to push and move and accomplish, I spent a good portion of an hour rippling the waves of my aching back. And so it was at the house, where every morning P and I watched birds gather in the grass as we drank our coffee, and the buzz of New York slipped from our ears and the backs of our shoulders, a little more each day, as we took walks and ate long lunches and generally reee-laxed.

Perhaps it is right that on the coast--where for most days the sky was luminous gray and the air so cold both P and I had to go to the local outlet store and purchase jackets, where we were suddenly away from the solitude of the country and in the arms and eyes and conversations of a large group of friends, all gathered in pending celebration--that my practice became not just shared, but spoken aloud, as I led a chilly (but soon vigorous warm) practice on spread-out beach towels on the deck of our temporary coastal home. The addition of another yogi made my practice come alive in a way that I find difficult to achieve when practicing on my own. I wanted it to be good, damnnit! And we sweated and moved and bent and twisted and inverted, so well my legs quivered after with the exertion of it. (What is it about company, that can so easily obliterate distractions?)

And perhaps also it was right that in Seattle--the place of my youth and late-youth (heh), a place which I feel I am rediscovering, now as an adult, and which also swells with memories and nostalgia and my own longing to live in a place which is beautiful--that I practiced in a new house in a new neighborhood, but in a city I know so well, outside beneath the trees, with my love just on the other side of a window, and the smells of Lake Washington spilling over the dry leaves around my feet, and that the trees and the height and the space of the deck forced a kind of improvisation to my practice, and that the past, after so many days of family and friends and childhood neighborhoods, was deeply present, but also, after the revelry of a much-anticipated wedding and the silent reclamation of a city I have long loved, and, more importantly, the appearance of a Self--more grown, more solid, more flexible--in all these places of old, meant that the future was there with me as well.

The Space I Am In...

Tomorrow morning I leave for a 2 week + vacation to visit family and friends in the West. I am over the moon about getting out of New York...watching people jostle each other through the doors on the subway this morning (as if we won't all get on, eventually) made me so grateful for the impending break.

I'm not certain how my practice will fall out while I'm gone. I went to class early this morning, so as to be limber for a long day of travel on the 'morrow. I am being strongly encouraged not to bring my yoga mat (space and all), but I'm undecided. Rolling it out in class this morning I was struck with what I am often struck with when rolling out my beautiful (now ragged) orange rubber mat--that it is such a clean square space to hold my practice. I have sweated and prayed and wondered and fallen and cried and struggled so many hours on that mat, in that particular 72" of space--it's like carrying a little temple around on my back. And on this vacation, where we will be in many spaces and with much family and where quiet time with my body and my breath will be perhaps hard to eek out, I might need my ratty orange temple, in order to carve out space for myself in all these foreign places.

It is also, I realize, the only thing which posesses as intimate a knowledge of my practice as I do. I love all its funny sweat marks and pock-marks and where my feet have worn down the rubber to its fibers. I want to use it until I can see the floor through it, and then I might have to hang it on my wall or something (P. would love that!)...I am so grateful for this rectangle of rubber. I mean really I am so grateful for this incredible versatile body and for Laughing Lotus which is my home away from home and for the amazing teachers who keep coming into my life and for all the hope of striving for an easier mind, but ALSO I am grateful for this strip of textile that I can role up and shove on shelves and in bags and lug around with me and lay down ANYWHERE and make a yoga studio of it.

That's it. I'm decided. It's coming with me.

After a while...

Um, I think my yoga blog ego suffered a bit of a blow a while back...hence the silence.

Possibly it's because no one is reading this. Or, if you are, (sorry) you are loved, and I apologize for the absence. Not to worry! All is well! It's just been days and then weeks and now, gulp, many weeks of hemming and hawing over the whats and whens and hows of my life.

Concretely: I will not be going to yoga school, I will be acting my pants off in several wonderful plays.

One door closes, another opens. Or sometimes; there's only room for one door at a time, which seems more ept.

My practice, however, is flourishing. Handstand and Forearm stand are inching their way towards me (or I towards them) and it will be only a matter of time now before I do not need the wall OR for the teacher to just come over and "stand by me while I do it" (How old am I?!!). It's the same for falling back into wheel...a brilliant and visceral hesitation to be overcome. For all of these poses it is the same:

I am strong enough to do it
I am flexible enough to do it
I have the form and the training to do it
I will not, probably, injure myself...

But all, also, require a supreme letting go. There is a moment, in each of these poses (whether coming up or coming down) where conscious control has to be relinquished and the body trusted (that legs and arms and neck will go where intended) and it is this moment (which widens out into a Grand Canyon of moments) in which I...pause. And in the pause I lose it all.

A teacher once said to me, "let your breathe be louder than your thoughts" and it was a revelation of sorts...or rather, a beautiful way to trick the mind. Example:

BODY: Time for handstand...

MIND: Um, okay. Okay, yes, cool. Cool. We can do this. I mean, woah, you're not going to do it right HERE, are you?

BODY: Yeah, I was...

MIND: What if you kick that girl? What if you fall weird on her block and you break your neck?!

BODY: I don't think, um...

MIND: Just, how about, how about just a little farther away from the wall? Baby steps. Baby steps.

BODY: No, I'd like to try it in the middle of the room.

MIND: I don't know. I don't know. I'm not really going to kick hard enough to accomplish that just to be sa--

BODY: Inhale. Exhale.

MIND: Are you--

BODY: INHALE

MIND: listen--

BODY: EXHALE..

INHALE...

(mind fading away into small birdlike whine...)

EXHALE...

etc. etc...

Ah, sigh. It could be that way, it really could. The microcosm of my life: Let go of the worrying and just let myself kick up into the sky.

Being Yoga

I've just signed up for the Being Yoga Conference. I hope it doesn't kill me.

Decisions, Decisions...

So, looming, once again, is Yoga School.

I have been wanting it, salivating over it, dreaming about it, for the last two years, and finally it is within my reach. I've done the math, I've gone over and over it: I can do it. If I really want it, I can make it work.

The thing standing in my way: Me. Well, Actor me is standing in my way. Yoga me says yes yes yes. Yoga me knows what an incredible thing it would be for me, how empowering and crystallizing it would be, and how much it could really only add, not only to my "self" (which is so deeply inseperable from myself as an actor) but to my ability to shape my career as I want it. Actor me has some other things to say. Actor me is horrified that I would think of turning down theatre work from now until January. Actor me has a million "what ifs". Actor me is worried I would be admitting defeat, or asking for it.

Yoga me would like to remind myself that this is something I am desperate to do, something that feeds me, and that, ultimately, will allow me more creative freedom and repose in my life. And also I might be good at it. And also I love it.

But work! Says Actor Me, how can I say no to work? How can I make myself unavailable for WORK?! What will happen? Won't I fall off the face of the planet?

I have the decision sitting in my hand, a little bird. But right now my fingers are cupped around it and I can not let it fly.

The Yoga of Sound...

Many Classes, One Post.

The theme this month at the Lotus: Nada Yoga, the yoga of sound. A beautiful cross-pollination for me, of the work I am doing in my Linklater classes, and my ongoing yoga practice. A deepening of work centering on the body and breath as central to the voice, and the voice as central to the expression of all things, not just verbal.

Stacey gave an incredible talk at the beginning of class on Tuesday, in which she discussed the origins of the famous yoga "Om" and the spiritual lineage of the Sanskrit language (in brief, of course). My distillation: a few enlightened dudes from the ancient times went up in to the mountains, sat as open vessels, and the universe poured into them the sounds that eventually came to make up the Sanskrit language. According to Stacey, the impetus to keep Sanskrit alive, after all these many thousand years, is because it is the only language that survives as a direct connection to what is considered divine sound (as in, sound divined from the universe).

Heavy stuff.

In Nada Yoga, the conceptual theory is that there is a universe of sound in which we are all existing, to which we are either tuned in or tuned out. Meaning, a kind of God-sound is available to us, and is a possible connective tissue between ourselves and larger consciousness, that we do not create (as in, I am producing sound) but we instead connect to. As in all spiritual thought bent in this direction, universal consciousness is water flowing through a faucet which we can either turn on or turn off. (But just because we've closed the spigot, it don't mean there ain't water there and available to us!)

And to get more specific, the sounds we chant at the beginning of class (my favorite part) are chanted, not because they're pretty (oh, but they are!!) but because these sounds are considered little doorways to God. One could, I suppose, ride the Om straight to enlightenment, if they really knew what they were doing...

The chants have always held a lot of power for me...there is something about the way the particular sounds of Sanskrit emerge from and dissolve into silence that just immediately soothes what can often be a tropical storm of thought in my head (thank you, Bryn, for that image!). And though we are often told of the power of mantra, of chanting, to be a focusing tool and a powerful pathway towards change, I have never quite believed it. I just like to sing, and I like how the words sound in my mouth, and if I sit down and try to make something of it, I'm just going to ruin it for myself...that's been my thinking. And also I've just not been able to stomach the thought of sitting down and chanting to Lakshmi or something when I don't even really know who that is or what I'm saying (apart from my handy-dandy Yoga Journal translation) as I would feel myself to be merely aping another culture--one which I do actually have some respect for. It all seems a bit too easy and too perfectly Western.

However, hearing Stacey talk about the Om (aum) has perhaps shifted my thinking a bit...

The Om, considered the root of the all sound...perhaps the root of all everything...the most universal of sounds, is made up of three distinct parts:

Ahhh.

Oooo.

Mmmm.

(Aum).

And in these three sounds lives the birth and death of sound. Ahhh, the creation, the birthing of sound, the possibility. Oooo is perseverance, the sustaining. And the Mmmm is the closing of the circle, the destruction of sound. Stacey likened these to the triumvirate of Hindu deities: Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Brahma representing creation, Vishnu--preservation, and Shiva the destroyer. But I don't know enough about these lovelies to speak intelligently about specific connections. (I will say, however, that there's got to be something to the whole idea of a holy trinity of powers, as it seems to repeat itself in religious literature of all flavors...) And so, contained within this one word, aum, is the whole cycle of life--illustrated through sound moving from the back of the throat, across the soft palette and finally vibrating against closed lips. It's beautiful. Born out of silence and returning to silence.

And, stealing from my Linklater work, if one's body is the conductor for sound, and one's spine is the pathway through which all impulses for sound travel, then what one is expressing when one is expressing, is not just a personal truth, but is a vital and universal one. I.e., we are elucidating at every moment, through sound, the matter of the universe--universal consciousness.

It's big, dude. It's big.