Interesting homework assignment...

One of our homework assignments this time was to pick something for a one day fast. It didn't have to be food, but anything that could show clearing, clarity, or purity based on the ideas of one of the niyamas, Shauca. We were advised to consider what we need to fast on... where do we proliferate, clutter, or confuse our life unnecessarily. We were to choose one aspect of our life and create the intention to cleanse in that direction. Several examples were given... and yes I know the obvious one of the clutter in my house would immediately leap to mind but since I am already working on that I decided to choose a different focus.

I had two candidates.
The first was a one day fast from any added sugar to what I eat throughout the day. I came to that because of all the sweet things I have been eating and craving lately: peanut butter and jam sandwiches, British cream tea with sugar, pie... the list goes on and on.

The second was to not play any of the computer games that have been pulling me away from my life lately. Aside from some occasional Words with Friends games on Facebook I also play a lot of time wasting games on my Galaxy Tablet: the usual things like solitaire and mah jong and sudoku as well as a lot of matching games, and a strangely addictive little game called Pocket Trains. I have been spending way too much time with them lately, mostly to avoid doing other things.

I ended up choosing the computer games because they seemed more of a problem.

So I did that on Saturday, Oct. 17 for the whole day. Truth is it helped to be pretty busy that day (yoga class in the morning and yoga workshop -- Wise Women -- in the afternoon) but even so, being home at night and after dinner when I would normally want to go play a game I couldn't. I ended up reading and thankfully falling asleep early from all the activity that day.

Sunday morning I woke up and didn't have exactly the same urge to get into my game computer as usual, although I do usually enjoy going to Pocket Trains for their daily challenge. I did end up getting to it but it didn't have exactly the same urgency as before.

What I learned:  well for me I can do anything for one day so it wasn't much of a challenge. Not that I wanted to take it further, but I think I need to go without things longer for it to make an impact. Also since these last weeks of the teacher training have been so challenging, I think this "fast" turned out to be the easiest thing I have had to do. But if nothing else, it made me realize how much time I have been wasting playing computer games (a realization I get now and then, then it fades, and I play again, then the realization hits, the cycle repeats).

I still have a long way to go...

Aparigraha and clutter...

As I look out into the cluttered room I had been saying I would clean up for months now, this week's homework assignment of looking at Aparigraha comes to mind. Aparigraha is the last of the five yamas of Patanjali’s Eight Limbs of Yoga and deals with the concept of non-possessiveness, non-grasping or non-greediness. In this day and age it is also extended to clutter and hoarding, a common theme in modern lifestyles, or at least mine. 

This is the shelf near my bed that I have been planning to have as my yoga book center since teacher training started... (and we are already in week 6 so that was 12 weeks ago!).

So it seemed to me that should be the first place I decluttered in keeping with Aparigraha... A shelf that held all my yoga books, close to my bed so I could grab a book and read in bed easily... and not have everything buried by gardening books and other junk that could just as easily be in another room.

Most of these books are for the training. Some of them I had before and others I have gotten since as other people have suggested them. I also have a few on my Android Tablet where I have my Kindle reader. 

Ok so that was the 1% tip of my house nightmare... my goal has been a little every day and that keeps getting put aside. My intention now is to keep that promise to myself... A little each day, even 10 minutes... do something every day to make the clutter go away and bring back my happiness within this house.

Satya (truth) and ahimsa (non-violence)

Moving on in the yamas of yoga this week we were to think about satya (truth) and then how it related back to last session's yama of ahimsa (non-violence).

Part of what we had to think about was when is it wise NOT to speak? I am reminded of the old saying from when I was growing up "if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything".

Truth is relative. What is absolute truth to one person may not be true to another. Which makes me wonder, is truth the same as non-lying? What about all those little white lies we tell, oh no I'm fine, no I don't need anything, oh I don't need to sit down, and things like that.

One of the articles we read said just because your ego needs a boost, that is not reason to speak. Stop yourself from saying something that doesn't need to be said. Don't feed the ego. Untruths is when your ego needs to pretend.

One of the other articles mentioned telling the truth versus not hurting somebody's feelings. The example given was seeing somebody in a really really ugly dress. Satya would have you say, "that's an ugly dress"but ahimsa would not want you to hurt that person's feelings. So what do you say? Especially if the person excitedly asks you," "do you like my dress?" and you have to say something. I think my tendency would be to find something, anything, in the dress that I liked so I could say maybe, "how colorful!" or something neutral.

Where telling the truth and not hurting someone's feelings is difficult is in relationships. But I think there are sometimes many truths, are many shades of the same truth. Judith Lassiter mentions in her article to choose words so they do the least harm in the most good. That satya as a yama has a restraint rather than action. What we should restrain from doing as opposed to what we should do. Slow down, filtering, considering words so they mesh with ahimsa. I guess the big point is that satya is not to be speech that may be factually accurate but harmful. And words can be very, very hurtful.

And sometimes, for me anyway, I need to slow down and really think about my words. I have a history of blurting out things that may be did not need to be said at that particular moment. If nothing else, maybe this yoga teacher training will be good to remind me to stop and think before I talk.

Yoga Sutra 1.1: “Now begins the scientific discipline of yoga.”

One of our homework assignments was to read the first Yoga Sutra, 1.1 and comment on what relevance the term "atha"  has for us.  HERE is an online reference our teacher gave us or we could use any book or readings we had.

Sutra 1.1:  “Now begins the scientific discipline of yoga.”  (Atha yoga anushasanam)

One meaning of Atha is "now" as in this very moment. It means to channel our energy is to be truly present. BE HERE NOW (Ram Dass). It also means being ready, or readying for the present moment. Perhaps that implies preparing for self-discovery or to figure out what yoga really means to us. Another way of putting it would also be commitment. Being fully committed to this journey.

Of course this first Sutra 1.1 might just be telling the audience something as simple as, "okay now we get a look at what yoga is" and then they get on with explaining yoga, just like we teach kids how to write explanatory paragraphs. First sentence is to tell the audience what you're going to tell them. Then you tell them what you need to say, and then at the end you say okay now I've told you whatever it is I had to tell you. It might just be that prosaic.... It might just be a topic sentence.

I prefer to think of it as being here now. Here now are going to start yoga.

I have spent a lot of time this week reading about yoga online and in our homework readings and various books we have for class. I think one of the key components that has come out this week is that yoga is individual. Everybody will experience it differently. You start at whatever point of experience and practice you have. And through all the various experiences of yoga, you only experience yoga by doing yoga. 

One of my favorite art journal teachers used to say "Start by starting." I think this is good for yoga too. A lot of people say they can't do yoga because they aren't flexible. Well yoga can help you be flexible, you don't have to start out flexible. Start where you are and just let it happen. Start by starting. If you're feeling wobbly on the yoga mat, that's okay start there. We present with your wobble and go from there. Today might be a wobbly day. That's okay. Or you might find like I did earlier today at yoga practice, that I started out wobbly but it didn't last. Suddenly I noticed I wasn't wobbling. Of course as soon as I noticed that, I lost my balance. That's how it works. I was no longer being present I suppose, but looking over the last few minutes, and I lost balance. Nothing major, it was just tree pose, and luckily even trees bend in the wind. I was no longer an oak tree, but maybe a little willow, and I was really bending in the wind.

Thoughts about values exercise...

After our last Sunday class, one of our new homework pieces was to carry something we thought about on the weekend into the next couple of weeks before we met again.

One of our class exercises last session was about our values. We had to make a list of all the values we could think of and then pick 10 of them that applied to us. Then we shared them with our training partner. Now I have done various values exercises in the past, including things that were more feelings than values such as Danielle Laporte's core desired feelings, which are how you want your actions to make you feel as well as how you're striving to live your life -- mine are listed HERE on this other blog post from earlier this year.  I had a list of values I had downloaded from the computer before so I looked on that list and I picked a whole bunch of things that I thought might apply to me and then I pick 10 of them. The 10 that I picked were:

• self-reliance
• self-improvement
• patience
• creativity
• balance
• calmness
• true to myself
• independence
• resourceful
• helpful

Then a came time to share our list with our partner. One thing that I realized as I heard her list was that most of her values were geared towards how she was going to treat or be with other people. Mine were mostly inward, about me and things that I thought would be valuable in my life. It was an interesting distinction – – not wanting to compare really but just noting that it was an interesting distinction, or difference, in our lists.

So I chose to think about this over the last couple of weeks and I realized that first of all I do have some values that include others but mostly the values that I feel are more inward, to help make me a better person, are things I need to have in place before I can truly be helpful to others. I think it is still something I need to think about but now that I'm aware of it think it will be easier to incorporate this thinking into my normal life.

Day 2 thoughts...

I didn't want to write "surviving Day 2" because it doesn't quite convey the sentiment I am looking for. "Experienced" is maybe more like it. Day 1 was very intense and when I got home I was trashed. Day 2 was less intense, shorter, and when I got home I still felt fine. I think some of it has to do with getting used to sitting on the floor for a longer time than I am used to.

So on Day 2 we had one new person join us who was absent the day before so Michelle used that as a good excuse to review everything and help teacher the new person what we had learned. I like that in teaching, used to do it myself in my Science classroom when I taught Middle School.

We also discussed an excellent article called "Yoga as Self-Transformation" from an old Yoga Journal (May/June 1980).  The author, Joel Kramer, had several important points to make about the process of yoga, dealing with the physical techniques, energy flows, and some of the stuff our minds throw at us as we progress in yoga. He refocused us on the idea of "Yoga, at its core, is looking within to understand the timeless question, 'Who am I?'"

A couple of points I really liked from the article:
"...yoga is a process that involves confronting your limits and transcending them."
"The essence of yoga is not attainments, but how awarely you work with your limits -- wherever and whatever they may be."
"So much of what limits our yoga practice is not in the body itself, but rather mental attitudes and habits."

Then we continued on our values exercise, which I want to write of more later. After that we listened to a Dharma talk by Jack Kornfield on who we really are, what identifies us... a lot of meat in this talk. I think the key point for me was towards the end: "What happens to us when we are who we truly are?"

Finally we reviewed the weekend with another teacher, Setheyne. One of our assignments from her was to take something we learned or talked about from the weekend to practice for the next 2 weeks. I chose to review my list of values and rethink why I chose the ones I did. I will write this out in a separate blog post.

If nothing else, this yoga teacher training is making me think a lot! Not just about yoga, but also about myself, who I am, what I am doing, where I am going, etc... the whole nine yards.  And that is a good thing.