Time Travel With Meditation

Dear Yogis

For a while now I have been starting my Friday 8.30am Ashtanga class at Eden Fitness with 10 minutes meditation. I know some find it really hard and some love it. Some think we’re not really doing anything and some come in late and noisily. (Better to wait outside, I think.) I found this great You Tube called Debunking the 5 Most Common Meditation Myths by Light Watkins. I think he might help us all persist with the practice.

Meditation, he says, has a reversal effect on biological ageing. We have a chronological age and a biological one. Chronology stays the same but we can speed up or slow down our biological ageing depending on how much stress we have. Meditate and become younger! It will refund the time you spend on it, busting the myth that we don’t have time to meditate. (Dr Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated at the age of 39. How old do you think the pathologists in autopsy thought his body was? Check out Light Watkins’ You Tube for the answer. They concluded that the age they gave his body was the result of a highly stressed career.)  

Light Watkins concludes that meditation repairs some of the wear and tear on the body and brings orderliness and efficiency to the mind. Meditation will cultivate inner peace and happiness and that’s what you in turn put out into the collective consciousness. I will add that yoga practice is meditation! Teachers introducing a new practitioner to meditation will tell them to watch the breath! Hmm! Sound familiar!

Home Studio

Some yogis in my lucky Home Studio are making the trepidatious move from Stretchy Yoga on Mondays and Tuesday to Ashtanga Yoga on Wednesdays and Thursdays… It’s going down well! Some are doing both. Come and have a go! Half the classes next week are fully booked, half are not. You can see what classes are available on my website. Also attached on this email.

Training

If you missed David Swenson last weekend, he’s in Cambridge for a Sunday evening class this weekend. It’s a privilege to know him and learn from him.

Tomorrow morning I’ve booked Aerial Yoga, 10.30-11.30 with my teacher, Valentina Candiani at COCO YOGA - 1 Dalling Road, W6 0JD. Come with me! Next weekend she starts her 40hrs Aerial Yoga Teacher Training which I’m signed up for. It’s the only Aerial Yoga Teacher training in the UK for Yoga Teachers. Come with me!

Yoga in the news

Eurek Alert publishes this press release which is widely covered today: £1.4 million grant to research benefit of yoga for people with multiple chronic health conditions. Northumbria University will study the clinical effectiveness and cost effectiveness of a specially-adapted yoga programme for older adults with ‘multimorbidity’ -  two or more long-term health conditions. Two thirds of people over the age of 65 in the UK have multimorbidity and account for 70% of NHS expenditure.

The Times OF India tells us that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in Buenos Aires for the G20 summit and the first thing he did was address thousands of Argentineans in a yoga class. Why can’t our Prime Minister do that! Modi said: "Yoga is bridging the vast distance between India and Argentina”

Kathina Robes and Yogi Clothes

Dear Yogis

Last weekend at Amaravati Monastery in Hemel Hempstead was the celebration called ‘Kathina’. It’s a robe offering ceremony and the day sees enormous generosity from the lay community and mountainous donations of necessities for the lives of the nuns and monks.

I asked Ajahn Amaro, the Abbot of Amaravati, how to write about Kathina and relate it to yoga. He told me that the word Kathina actually means frame on which cloth to make the robe is made. To make a robe in the Buddha’s time, his disciples collected bits of cloth from rubbish piles, cemeteries and any other discarded fragments they could come across. The Buddha asked his first disciple, Ananda, to arrange the pieces of cloth in the pattern of the paddy fields of Mahavagga which were divided into short pieces, rows and boundaries. Robes are still made in this pattern. Ajahn Amaro tells me it’s the oldest style of dress still “in fashion” after 2,500 years.

Does this relate to yoga? Well, the Buddha was from Yogi times. He was a yogi. Yogis inhabited the outskirts of society and scavenged cloth for clothing. The Buddha determined on making something beautiful out of something unpromising. I feel completely like that with some postures! This’ll never happen, I think, and then the posture comes only because of the strong framework that supports our practice, the breath. It’s the framework on which we pull all the pieces, all the postures together. Kathina can also be translated as ‘difficult’ which reminds us that our practice is not easy.

Kathina is also about tremendous generosity and we’re coming up to Christmas, a festival of generosity. (Imagine a life with no provision in our calendar or in our culture to celebrate giving!) Generosity does us good. It will debilitate those self-defeating qualities such as selfishness, greed and lack of compassion and therefore can only strengthen us. The more we practice generosity, the more we can meet the more demanding acts of self-sacrifice that life demands.

Home Studio

I’ve been teaching some Iyengar stretches. I have to admit, I’m not sure Iyengar himself would recognise them but I fashioned an Iyengar-style fixed rope. I’ve attached some of the stretches used in a pregnancy class. You don’t need the bump to give them a go. You can see what classes are available on my website. Also attached on this email.

Training

David Swenson sessions start tonight and last all weekend. See if there are any spots left and come along! The Centenery of BKS Iyengar’s birth is coming up. On the 14th and 15th of December at the Iyengar Institute there will be two events: a ‘100 Asana Practice’ interspersed with readings and poems by or about Iyengar and an evening of music, dance, song and storytelling.

Yoga in the news

The Times asks the most important question of all: ‘Will your bum look better in £200 leggings?’. Whereas yogis in ancient times scavenged for scraps of cloth, The Times tells us in tabloid-hyperbole that: ‘in the workout world there is nothing that tells you more about a woman’s fitness ethic than what is worn on her legs’. There is apparently ‘legging rivalry in New York’s gyms’.

The Evening Standard tells us: Black Friday 2018: The best fitness class deals in London this year. There are some good deals here – even a couple of free offers. firstlightcycle.co.uk. in Westfield looks good as does bloklondon.com in East London.

Making A Meal Of Meditation

Dear Yogis

We’re coming into the season of eating (!) so I thought I’d tell you of something we did recently on The Happiness Retreat. We practiced mindful eating. You probably won’t employ this kind of meditation on Christmas Day but you could have a go beforehand! Eating mindfully means eating in total silence. It’s a little strange at first and the urge to make conversation, which seems the polite and friendly thing to do, can be so overwhelming that we forget our task. However, a simple introduction to explain exactly how to set your mind makes the experience surprisingly satisfying.

Deborah Smith led us into the practice: set your intention to eat with presence; take time to appreciate where the food comes from, the time and expertise behind the recipes, the water needed, the infrastructure, the transport… Then, while eating, the tastes and textures, how the tastes combine. Maybe you can feel hunger beforehand and satiated afterwards.

While queuing at the buffet I started by thinking about the plate and how many it had fed before me. Before eating I took five long Ujjayi breaths to drop right down into my rest & digest system. I looked at the food to figure out where it had come from, I pictured the farmers, the miles, the time and the trouble it took to get it to me, the flights, trains and trucks, the water systems and plumbing. Then something I think I’ve never done before: proper slow eating, appreciating the combinations of textures and tastes, how some foods melt, some need chewing, and waiting for one mouthful to finish completely before taking another one. Deborah said that we typically notice the first mouthful and the last. (I would add to that. Imagine that you run in from work and take half an hour to whip up and eat a meal, snatch a bit of Bruce Willis in a terrorist-infested building while eating then rush out again! You’re totally in the sympathetic nervous system which is not your rest and digest system. In that mode, the body isn’t interested in absorbing the goodness and nutrition and digesting healthily.)

Anyway, at the end of the mindful meal, the greedy me popped up and wanted an unnecessary second helping. It’s hilarious, but without the cover of conversation it’s impossible to go back to the buffet and take seconds! That would be the walk of shame. I told my saliva to go back to sleep and take my taste buds too. I thought of the food working its way down into my digestive system without anything else following. I drew up the drawbridge till the next meal and finished with some gentle long breaths.

Perhaps a few goes of this in the run-up to Christmas will make your Christmas meal more enjoyable, less balooning!

Home Studio

I have promised various people the track list of music I have been playing in my Home Studio this week. Here it is: The Heart of Meditation by Om in the Womb; Om Meditation from the same album, Baba Hanuman by Shantala; Lalitha Ashtotram by Craig Pruess & Ananda.

Come to class to hear more! You can see what’s available on my website.

Training

I’m really excited to be seeing my teacher David Swenson again next weekend. Come with me (Triyoga) to experience his magic! Yesterday I went to an Iyengar class with Alaric Newcombe (Triyoga Camden, Thursdays 3.30-5.30) and I came away so inspired and happy that I want to return as often as I can. I ended up in lotus headstand! We did what turned out to be a lotus workshop and I brought a couple of the drills back to torture the Home Studio yogis with.

Yoga in the news

Here’s something a bit different. You may have heard of the shootings in a yoga studio in America. The Washington Post gives us Why a far-right extremist targeted a yoga studio for violence and takes us through the logical steps from the perceived threat of yoga to Christianity, how yoga was part of a counter culture, it aided female liberation, and how yoga offends the alt-right. Such a pity.

An Answer For All Questions

Dear Yogis

This week I wrote to Dr Timothy McCall, author of the indispensable Yoga As Medicine. I wanted advice about a yogi and, while he’s pondering my question, he gave me a stop-gap answer that covers all of us, whatever our question or problem is: “Work to reduce his stress and otherwise bring him into balance. Good luck”.

Actually, I do have that magic wand! In every class, when I emphasise the importance of lovely long breathing and reducing sympathetic nervous system dominance (de-stressing), I wave the wand of the wonderous benefits of the parasympathetic nervous system. Shall I recap on those benefits? I’ll let this Ted Talk, Breathe, by a sports coach, Joe DiStefano recap: breathing properly is about investing in your vitality and believing in yourself, delivering more nutrition to our cells, getting rid of pain, even, he claims, releasing hamstrings!

He goes further. The parasympathetic system, “wants to use all the energy it can to optimise your immune system, to detoxify, to digest your food, and, of course, maintain a very strong interest in sex”. And to remind you of the monstrous effects of sympathetic (fight or flight) overdrive he lists: cardiac mortality, acid reflux, erectile dysfunction, restless leg syndrome, low back pain, anxiety and depression.

Now that I have your attention, try some of his breathing techniques.

1.    Inhale, then exhale three times longer than the inhale.

2.    Block one side of the nose and take ten breaths, then do the other side.

3.    As you get better, progress to alternate nostril breathing.

4.    Baby postures for breathing – you’ll have to watch that bit to see the postures!

5.    Finally, blow up a balloon in the position he shows. He has his athletes doing this. 

Home Studio

Thursday evening Ashtanga classes are back to 8.00. Sorry about that disruption. It’s all back to normal now. Come to class! You can see what’s available on my website.

Training

I’ve signed up for a class tonight; Adam Hustler’s Heavenly Hips and Tight Bits at Triyoga Soho 19.30-21.30. At the recent Yoga Show I took a workshop with him and I like the way he target’s muscles and makes us think about what we’re doing. My cherished teacher David Swenson is back in the country and teaching at Triyoga Soho on the weekend of Friday 23rd to Sunday 24th. I’m doing both Saturday and Sunday. A couple of the workshops are discussions: ‘fear, focus, forgiveness + fulfilment’ and ‘advantages of age + the myth of eternal youth’.

Eden Yogis, go to Alain’s new Ashtanga classes if you want to experience what a ‘Counted’ Led Primary Series’ class is like – in Sanskrit! Monday 8.20-9.20 and Wednesday 2.00-3.30.

Yoga in the news

The Metro posts a helpful article called: Can yoga help with fertility issues? It’s true that infertility is associated with stress levels and yoga is associated with de-stressing. This interesting article sadly commits this spelling-mistake howler: ‘Another option is medication classes or a gong bath’, and this incisive technical medical gem from Tim Allardyce, a chartered physiotherapist: ‘‘Doing yoga will not directly make you pregnant.’ Otherwise worthy… for men too. Stress is associated with a lower sperm count.

This last week was International Stress Awareness Week and FM (Facilities Management) World says that ‘almost half of workers want a yoga and meditation room and exercise facilities to help tackle workplace stress’. A baffling amount of people have had ongoing workplace stress for the past five years. Have a look at the stats in this article. I’m so pleased to teach yoga in the workplace. It’s so massively important.

Wild, Gyrating Yoga

Dear Yogis

Like a bug to a light bulb I did the David Sye workshop at the Yoga Show. I’m drawn by his endless positivity and funky James-Brown-inspired soundtrack. The actual practice is wild: lots of shaking, pulsing and gyrating. While moving our hips in an obscene manner he tells us off for not living with maximum happiness and admonishes us for wasting time instead of living life to the full. Every time I’m with him I come away with tremendous gratitude and feel a little less imprisoned behind my own bars.

This month’s Om Yoga magazine has an interview with him. Here are a couple of extracts from the article. His father, Frankie Vaughan, wanted him to train with a Hungarian teacher called Clara Buck ‘who emphasised freedom and following one’s inner teacher’. She’d say: “You didn’t come here to be a yogi, you came here to be a human being”. Also in the article he says: ‘Once you understand that celebrating life comes from within, you realise you’re on an exploration and it’s about preparing to leave this world. Yoga is teaching you to enjoy your life as much as possible while preparing you for infinity.’

Here’s something from him you can put into practice immediately. When you have a problem, he said, don’t meet it at the energy level you are in. Go out and run, dance, do yoga, do anything to come back with higher energy. Then meet the problem from this higher place. Guess what; it works! More compassion comes. Your higher and more energised self gives you more thoughtfulness and awareness. You think about the opposite point of view and you avoid getting into an arms race of arguments or resistance.

Home Studio

Just for a little while the Thursday evening Ashtanga class will start at 8.30 while I look after a corporate yoga class. This will finish on November 22nd and possibly before. This might suit one or two of you. I’ve added a Tuesday class at 6.00 next week because all the other Yin-style classes booked up. Come to class! You can see what’s available on my website.

Training

Eden Yogis, don’t forget Alain’s new Ashtanga classes: Monday 8.20-9.20 and Wednesday 2.00-3.30 – a rare 90 minute class in a gym! Lucky devils! I’ve signed up for a couple of things that you can join me in. Next Friday, 9th November, I’m going to Triyoga Soho for Adam Husler’s Heavenly Hips + Tight Bits. For yoga teachers there’s training with my teacher Valentina Candiani  - 40hrs Aerial Yoga Teacher Training on the 8th-9th and 15th-16th December. I need to go to some aerial classes before that so if you fancy coming with me let’s arrange a date.

Yoga in the news

As yet another Home Studio yogi succumbs to the lure of Lulu Lemons, Bloomberg tells us: Yoga pants built a $48 billion industry that's replacing jeans, plunging denim into an existential crisis! ‘Years ago, research was limited to focus groups and feedback from store associates who would query their shoppers. Now there are fabric labs, especially in the athletic-wear space. Lululemon’s research arm does motion-capture testing and uses pressure sensors that allow researchers to test how garments work as they move’. Hence the price!!!

Happy November