creating meaning

Each day, at every moment we can create meaning and value. We are always “Poised for Grace”, poised to receive Grace, poised to offer Grace.

12:42 PM Sep 16th from Ping.fm
from Jamie Allison on twitter http://twitter.com/jamieomzone

Donna Farhi on embodiment

Donna Farhi

“Everything that has ever happened to us—our birth, the fall from a tree at the age of six, our thoughts, feelings, what we eat, the climate we live in—is inscribed upon our body, creating a living archaeological record. When we develop an awareness of the interior movement that permeates the body, we gain access to the movement of our minds. Yoga is a means of revealing our connection to this natural wisdom.” (83).

 

84- objectification of the body. State of dissociation. “Physical fitness” – focuses on superficial appearance of body- armouring of the body “causes a numbing of the subtler sensations and feeling and, not coincidentally, dampens any possibly awareness we might cultivate of deeper body systems.” (85)

 

85-6 “Instead of directing the body as a separate entity, we relocate our minds within our body and begin to listen to the nonverbal, nonmental information contained within the soma. As we give our full attention to every breath, movement, and the subtlest of sensations, the body becomes mindful, the mind becomes embodied. In so doing, we directly experience the body as an opaque form of consciousness, and we start to see the intimate relationship between the contents of what we think, feel, and imagine and our physical reality. In this reconciliation between body and mind we begin to experience a unitive rather than divisive state. This is what distinguishes the authentic practice of hatha Yoga from mere stretching.”

 

-       imitations of the outer world  in asanas- creativity, discovery of origins of movement and original meaning of gesture (87).

 

88-
“when we first enter a posture we are met by our ability of inability to take on this new form. We feel all the palces where we hold tension. These areas of accumulated tension represent the repetition of our ideation process, that is, our thoughts, fears, tensions, and anxieties coalescing into distinct patterns of tension and form our unique individual posture or attitude of life.

donna farhi

 

http://www.commonground.ca/iss/0411160/cg160_Farhi.shtml

For many years teaching and practising was stabbing in the dark. I was trying to find a way back to a natural and loving way of being with the practice and that’s what I’m sharing now, especially with people who want to train as teacher. It’s to teach from the heart, from the essential message, of the tradition, as that is so desperately what people need to hear when they go to a yoga class.
JR: What is that essential heart?
DF: I think first and foremost it is to meet every person who comes into the room with an unconditional accepting presence, and to see them as already whole; to recognize that each of us has some degree of fragmentation. We come in with our problems and our neuroses and our physical conditions and our history. So, to see through that and to be seeing each person as whole – and everyone’s desperately wanting to be seen in this way – is healing, to hold the vision of wholeness in the faith in my own wholeness and the wholeness of the student.

The other message which is perhaps counter to how some would interpret this tradition is that I think we all have an inner teacher and if we’re listening and quiet we’ll be given those answers, whether those answers are how to move or what to say in this moment, what to do or not to do in this moment. We all have that wisdom. I feel my job as a teacher is not so much to share my wisdom but to create a context in which the other person can discover their unlimited access to their own wisdom-nature.
It is like setting up a dinner table for guests. You set flowers on the table, prepare the cutlery just so, prepare the meal and then because there’s this expectation that something special is going to happen, something special does happen. I have that expectation in every class, and I think that sets up a field for people to awaken to the wonderfulness of this moment when we just stop long enough to pay attention.
I have a high expectation of teachers.

JR: To set up the context. Could you talk a bit about the difference between teaching teachers rather than students?
DF: Teaching teachers challenges me probably more than any other kind of teaching I do in that I have to break down what may be intuitive or unconscious for me as a teacher. It may be information that I arrived at intuitively or unconsciously and now I have to make that process conscious within myself, stratify and codify it. Deconstruct the steps to this process and help the teachers I’m training become cognizant of those steps. It’s important that they’re cognizant because they have to know where in this series of steps is the student. Where do I meet this person right now, how can I most effectively work with the person who is before me?
I think what is also very challenging about the model that I’m working from is that it’s not formulaic. It’s not paint by numbers. It’s a model that demands a deductive awareness on the part of the teacher to listen and respond to the students. The other part of the model which I think is terribly missing in most teaching that goes on in our culture is that every technique a teacher uses needs to be assessed in terms of whether it’s moving a student towards independence and freedom or whether it’s moving them in the direction of dependence.
That totally alters every word that comes out of your mouth, because you’re guiding a process of inquiry rather than telling the person what it is they should feel or how they should feel it. It’s a very different model for teaching, but I’ve worked from different ones and it does bring the student in direct contact with that force which is animating them. That’s the main thing I think that’s missing at the moment in the popularization of yoga.
The public is being misled in a sense that yoga equals asana, all these wondrous and crazy looking postures. In its essence, yoga has nothing to do with the posture or gymnastic physical feats. It has to do with using the body to connect to that animating force. So, if I’m practising asana it’s to connect myself to that which animates me: to the universe, to life and to nature. If I’m doing meditation or a breathing practice or karma yoga the goal is not to get your foot on the back of your head.
In the last decade yoga has very much gone in the direction of objectification and a complete 180 degrees from the original purpose of the tradition, which is to recognize its paradoxical nature. It’s got a strong somatic base and the purpose of that is to use the body to directly experience that we are more than our body.
JR: Could you describe a direct somatic experience?
DF: Well, somatic is any practice that’s embodied, anything that brings you into the sensation of the physical body.
JR: So it’s a presence that comes with that?
DF: Not necessarily. It is what makes yoga such an extraordinary tradition in that it has this strong basis of embodied spirituality. But there’s a paradox and this is where I think those of us in the West have tripped up.
We have this strong embodied portion to the practice but the purpose of those embodiment practices is to directly experience, not as something intellectual or that “I think,” but directly in-body knowing that while my body is a lovely thing to have, I am more than that. The direction yoga has gone in the last decade in the West is to use the practices to build up the body as our exclusive identity. So, now we have yoga for abs and for keeping you forever young and yoga that’s going to make the body more beautiful and perfect.
Now, it can generally make the body more beautiful and healthy, but that’s not the ultimate purpose of the practise. We call this losing the plot. What is the real storyline here and where did we lose the plot?
On the upside I would say there is a groundswell internationally now. Everywhere I travel to teach there’s a groundswell of people who have done these physical practices to the nth degree. They’ve done their 30-minute headstand. They’ve practised and practised the physical poses, have taken it to the limit and are now asking the question “Is this all there is?” in the same way that someone who collects houses, cars, beautiful women and money in the bank might pause and ask that question.
People who’ve been doing these practices are now asking that question and I see my role as a bridge for people who’ve been working with a very physical practise of asana and are now looking to use it within the context of the whole tradition, rather than as a practise unto itself. It was never meant to be done just by itself. It was meant to be done in relationship to the whole tradition.
JR: What’s closest to your own heart now?
DF: In the last year I’ve noticed a profound shift in my spiritual life – my whole life – it’s all the same to me. I feel an immense comfort in just being and a faith in life that wasn’t there so much before. I always saw the universe as an essentially hostile place and I don’t any more, I don’t experience it that way any more.
I feel it very strongly in working with people now because when I walk into the room there may be a little anxiety before I show up to teach 50 teachers, but after a few minutes I just feel so at ease. I feel such a trust in just being, that I don’t have to know the answers. I can be, as I tell my trainees, in an intelligent unknowing state, and to be teaching from and to be with everyone from that place. There’s a great joy in that and it sets up a joyousness in the room, too.
So, I’m taking immense satisfaction from teaching and practising and being at the moment.
The other thing is that I have a huge passion for horses and studying natural horsemanship. I’m taking my yoga into my relationship with my horses at home. I think that’s going to be my next big yoga, the study of horsemanship.
JR: I have a daughter who’d love to help you with that.
DF: I have two horses at home. I have an Arabian warmblood waiting there for me that has only been ridden a few times, so I have a very exciting project to go home to.
JR: I don’t know much about horses, but I remember the first time one started galloping I had no control.
DF: They’re strong teachers. There are many metaphors between the practice of yoga and the practice of being in partnership with horses. It takes a great deal of training, skill and patience not to control the horse, but all of that work is to be able to ride and allow the spirit of the horse to come through without fear.
I’ve learned more from my horses in the last seven years than I have from any formal yoga teachers, because they put me right up against whatever is stuck in me. If I’m working through a problem with my horse it’s because there’s something stuck in me and the horse has found it and we’re not going to progress until I figure out what that is in me that needs to be resolved, be that unresolved violence or impatience or a lack of acceptance, whatever the issue is.
They’re masters at it, and they’re thousand pound masters. You need to pay attention.
JR: I guess this could be said about all relationships.
DF: The big one with horses is you have to overcome your fear of death, because they’re so immensely powerful that if you’re going to be in partnership with that immense power and not contain, distort or constrict it, you have to have a kind of fearlessness. And you can’t pretend, they know.

Donna Farhi has been practising yoga for 28 years and teaching since 1982. She leads intensives and teacher training programs internationally. Donna has been the asana columnist for both Yoga Journal and Yoga International Magazine, and is the author of the contemporary classics, The Breathing Book, and Yoga Mind, Body & Spirit: A Return to Wholeness. Her third book Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living (Harper SanFrancisco) is an exploration of yoga as a life-long apprenticeship. Born in the US, Donna now resides in Christchurch, New Zealand. To access Donna’s teaching schedule please visit her website at: www.donnafarhi.co.nz.

Donna’s next visit to Vancouver will be next year. The five-day retreat runs from September 30 to October 5, 2005. Call Leila Stuart for details 604-536-7894 or contact leila-yoga@shaw.ca

Thich Nhat Hanh- Mindfulness and Pain

“When mindfulness embraces pain, it begins to penetrate and transform it, like sunshine penetrating a flower bud and helping it to blossom. When mindfulness touches something beautiful, it reveals its beauty. When it touches something painful, it transforms and heals it.”

“We do not have to be afraid of our pain if our mindfulness is there to embrace and transform it.”

From Seeds of Compassion, by Thich Nhat Hanh

UPAs and road map to the heart

on Jamie Allyson’s (certified Anusara teacher) bio:

http://www.omzoneyoga.com/About_Jamie.html

“The Universal Principles of Alignment of Anusara Yoga truly are a road map to the heart, a road map for skillful living, and a way to embrace and maximize one’s potential. When we make changes in the tangible outer form of the body we make huge shifts in the heart and mind as well.”

Also: http://www.omzoneyoga.com/Live_Deeply.html- really great explanation of the UPAs. “These principles are not an arduous task to memorize but a beautiful template to embody with every breath, a way of being that can be owned at a deep visceral level.” Also she goes through each principle and illustrates how it manifests mentally and physically.

John talks about embodyment

“I can tell how people will respond to situations just by looking at their bodies, because they hold their bodies based on patterns of mind. I’ll watch what parts they’re holding tight because of how they see themselves or trauma or abuse. You can tell if someone has been put down or if someone has been coddled. It’s fantastic.”

“The whole point of Anusara is to build people’s esteem and empower them to align with nature in ways that realize the best of their potential. Yoga is scientific. It’s thousands of years old , but can be applied to twenty-first-century Texas.”

interview by Mimi Swartz

Texas Monthly (texasmonthly.com)

Sept 2009, pg 24