Urdhva Mukha

After 14 years at 792 Union Street, my beloved home-base yoga center, Park Slope Yoga, has consolidated to its sister space across the street at 837 Union. The center was originally opened on Union on purpose; after all the translation of the Sanskrit word “Yoga” means “union”. There are many ways of describing what that means. I like to think of it as union of our personality self, or “small” self, with a greater sense of the connectedness of all things and the understanding that just as a drop of water is part of the ocean, we are an inherent part of and inseparable from the rest of the universe. Clinging to just the small definition of ourselves is often our biggest source of suffering. Clinging to anything can be a source of suffering.

I thought I might not be able to let go of the original studio space at 792 Union. I have been teaching there almost since they opened 14 years ago, and I taught my first ever public class in that studio. I have seen a lot of changes there—the maturation of students’ practices, new gorgeous wood flooring installed, various wall colors, and the explosion of green leaves and flowers from the plants growing in the skylight. Teachers have come and gone, students have come and gone and returned again, and my own teaching and practice has shifted over all those years. Teaching my last few classes there was bittersweet, loaded with my own personal history of the studio and full of the care and admiration I have for the students.

The funny thing is that I thought I would miss that space more than I do. I’ve been teaching in the new space for the past week (and had taught weekend classes there for many years, which helps), and the new space holds so much love (yes, LOVE!) and brightness and it’s simply like the ocean wave took all of us little water droplets and brought us to a new space that, just like the old one, nurtures our practice inside and out. The plants, some who have lived to see upwards of 40,000 classes in the old studio, are moving across the street to the new space. We spent hours detangling them, pruning them, bathing them. I hope they go up in the skylights where they can jungle up again and watch from above as we practice and breathe and hone our awareness on our mats.

Here are all the plants, detangled and awaiting a bath and their new home. (Shhhh…Don’t tell Marvel comics I’m wearing that shirt!!)

One thing that’s very freeing about the teaching of union is that we no longer have to get so caught up in the external details or “look” of things. We can instead remind ourselves of the heart or essence, the deeper qualities and true sameness at the depth of everything. Because honestly we all know that external stuff breaks, gets lost, gets stolen, or in some way lets us down in the long run. There’s an Indian parable that I love about a bicycle. I can’t find the original, so here’s my updated version.

There’s this really ahead of her time hipster in 1999, in NYC, who has the most awesome fixed-gear bike ever. She loves it to pieces and rides it everywhere. It gets her to work, to the park, to see her friends, to run errands, everything. She’s had it for a year or two when the seat gets stolen, so she replaces it. Not too long after that she accidentally leaves it out in the rain and her chain rusts. She gets a new chain and at the same time decides to change some of the hardware so it will ride a little smoother. Every once in a while she has to replace a ripped tire, and at one point a parking car bends one of her wheels so she has to get new ones. She’s a careful rider, but she’s in a small accident that skews her frame, so she does her best to replace it with one that’s very similar. She loves her bike and takes good care of it and makes sure everything is always in working order. One day the worst happens. She locks her bike outside of a restaurant to meet a friend for dinner. When they come out, her bike is gone. Not a trace of it remains. She’s very upset and says to her friend, “I can’t believe this! I’ve had that bike since 1999!! I rode it everywhere. It’s like they stole a piece of me.” Her friend comforts her and thinks about it for a minute. “But,” says her friend, “you actually haven’t had that bike for that long. You have the memories and experiences from that bike, but really not even one tiny screw from the original bike was parked outside. They didn’t steal your bike. They just stole all the replacement parts!”

In it’s own way, pretty much everything is like that bike. Our bodies replace all their cells over the course of seven years, our minds are constantly being “made up” and then changing course once more, we grow and mature and our perception of the world around us changes as we change and experience our lives. It is when we resist change and cling to our painful or outdated ideas or expectations that we suffer. Our yoga practice changes, our depth of awareness on and off the mat deepens, and yes, sometimes our beloved yoga centers move across the street. I am truly grateful for everything that I’ve learned and experienced at 792 Union and I’m so happy the wave has carried us all over to 837 Union. This might sound like a Hallmark card, but I really mean it: May we keep growing and evolving together as a yoga community, on and off the mat, wherever we are.

This post is primarily in response to Edward’s comment on my NYT post; but it’s also one of the many topics I’ve been wanting to write about, so here is the perfect opportunity. Edward’s comment is as follows:

Hi I enjoyed reading this article as s follow up to the nyt article. There is one thing however, the pushing part. I believe that students need to be pushed in all centers where ” learning” is taking place. Physically and mentally. Generally when we are out of our comfort zone those spaces are our greatest resource for growth. I have a teacher whom I consider to be an enlightened beibg and my aspect of faith and love for them allowss me to grow as I get adjustment s from them. And they have thrown my body into positions I normally would not do. Maybe that is a component in the west that is crucially missing as an aspect of yoga, real surrender to a guru. I feel that is a reason why many get injured… its still to much about the self……..

Surrender in yoga practice is a really big topic for me, one shaded in a lot of graytones; though at one time in my life it was very black and white. I used to believe that surrender to the asana (and otherwise) yoga teacher was essential to the practice, and if I wasn’t surrendering, then I was indulging in my ego and therefore not practicing yoga. That has changed for me significantly, for sure.

I have spent days organizing and writing my thoughts around this topic, and have come to the conclusion that there are really two sub-topics at hand. One is surrender to an enlightened being (who may be an asana teacher, but I don’t have personal experience of an enlightened asana teacher), and the other is surrender to an asana teacher who, though they practice and may even meditate, are not enlightened. This post covers the teacher or guru of the enlightened variety, from my experience.

Coming from the Jivamukti tradition, which has a large component of surrender to it, I totally hear what Edward is saying. If we practice yoga (and I’m mostly speaking to yoga asana here) to get a better ass, to acquire a fun set of party tricks, to impress other people, to compete with ourselves or others, we’re not really practicing yoga. It’s not inherently bad to want a stronger, leaner body and to want to feel good in the body, but if we are truly practicing yoga, that’s not the sole purpose of our practice. When I first learned yoga philosophy and the scriptures, I was taught that we as humans are rather heavy on ego and lightweights when it comes to humility and surrender. You see it all the time on the streets of Brooklyn: almost everyone in cars, on bikes, and walking is primarily thinking of themselves as if they are the only person trying to get somewhere. You can extend this metaphor to many of the aspects of our lives. It takes a lot of strength and presence to cede to other travelers and let them go first.

When you take this idea into the deeper aspects of surrender and the guru/student relationship, it gets a lot more complicated. Guru, according to Sharon Gannon, means “remover of darkness.” It is the rumover of the gu, or the remover of the goo. The goo is all our misunderstandings about who we truly are that causes us to act so ungraciously at times, or conversely causes us to bend to everyone else’s will without a lick of confidence in our own divine nature. Only enlightened beings are gurus. They are experiencing the oneness and connectedness of all things all the time.

My own guru (I usually call Her my teacher) Ammachi, is one such being. She is known as the “hugging saint”, and she will sit for 20 hours at a time (without getting up and without a bathroom or snack break) and will hug everyone who comes to Her with complete acceptance and love. The next time you’re on a subway car, imagine hugging everyone in the car as if they were the most dear person in your life. Yes, even the person who is drunk asleep on the bench and has a lame infected foot and smells really really putrid. I don’t know that I could do that.

Amma right before Devi Bhava in D.C. during the summer, 2010. Devi Bhava nights are special. She dresses in a colorful sari (instead of white) and the whole night tends to be more intense, awesome, and challenging for the ego! (Devi here means Divine Mother, Bhava means mood.)

Amma’s primary message is service or seva: to help out others in need and to see them all as being the same as She is. I have never heard Her ask any of us to surrender to Her. She asks us to be kind, generous, and to do good things. But she does have a way of placing you in challenging situations, especially when you’re around Her, and the only way to make these situations work and not become a crazy mess is to let go of the ego and stop thinking about how everything is soley affecting YOU.

The following story illustrates what I believe surrender truly is. Over ten years ago I was doing a particular seva (selfless service) for Amma when she was having public programs in New York. I was doing a job called “Assistant Lap.” The lowdown is that when you go to Amma for a hug, it’s all quite orchestrated; otherwise it would be mayhem. You get a token with a number on it when you first arrive, and then you have to wait for your number to come up before you get on the line to get a hug. There are sevites all along the way that facilitate that process.

My job was right next to Amma and I was told to watch people’s hands as they went for their hug. Often people are so happy to see Her that they try to hug Her as She hugs them, and in the process might pull on Her or hurt Her. Instead, we ask that they put their hands on the armrests of the chair so that it’s easier for Her. I was diligently making sure hands were going on to the armrest and not onto Amma’s back, to the point where I was taking people by the arm and guiding their hand off of Her and onto the chair. Suddenly, mid-hug, Amma turned and slapped my hand. Hard. Did it hurt me physically? Yes. It stung! Did it hurt me mentally? Oh yes. It really stung!! I felt my face flush bright red and a welling up of tears behind my eyes. I was crushed.

Here’s where the pushing is from the Guru, and how the surrender works. When you think you are serving the Guru and you get reprimanded, until you develop even-mindedness you will feel it really intensely, like you failed or She hates you or something. But She was essentially telling me that I was handling everyone too strongly and that I needed to reset my intention. She was pushing me not only to do my job more lovingly, but more importantly not freak out because I thought I let Her down. In Her world, there’s no concept of “You, Robin Pickering, failed as a sevite and are useless at your job and you suck and that’s why I had to slap you and why don’t you just go crawl in a hole and die.” But that’s what it feels like to the ego, at least that’s how it felt to my ego. No matter how bad I felt, I wasn’t going to argue with my Guru about a hand slapping. I wasn’t going to run from the seva. I had to recalibrate and stay present and focused, and THAT was the surrender.

Right after slapping me, Amma continued hugging everyone and flashing them her gorgeous smile. I mean, you don't have to take her on as your guru or anthing, but man, look at those eyes!!

It was difficult, this surrender and figuring it out. I knew that if I wasn’t strong enough with people, the woman doing “Lap” (the one who guides the people into and off of Amma’s lap) would most likely scold me for not doing my job. I knew if I didn’t soften my approach, I’d probably get another slap or be discharged from the job. If you have an enlightened guru, you probably understand that being allowed to stand within a foot of your teacher for a half an hour while doing service is an indescribably incredible experience. I wanted to stay near Her and had to work it out. It was the dance around how to do my job properly and how to accept and move on from the slapping that was hard. Right then and there, while everything still stung, the seeds of proper surrender were being sown.

All the sevites or devotees work on finding that equilibrium around Her, and, through the years, She has challenged it every single time I’ve been in Her presence. Sevites affectionately (or not so, depending) refer to it as the “lila” or the game. The rules and conditions keep changing and your job is to do your job amid all the confusion of old rules and new rules; meanwhile you are constantly interacting with every type of person imaginable. More often than not they exhibit personalities and needs that challenge the prospect of a job smoothly done. And like I said, one of Amma’s main teachings is to see all people as if they were Her Herself. Working and interacting in that context is in itself a huge ego-buster.

But as for asana, Amma doesn’t teach it. She can sit in lotus and variations thereof for 14 to 20 hours at a time and hug people and chat with them and be her bright shining Self, but she doesn’t practice trikonasna or ustrasana. She doesn’t have to. So I don’t have any kind of context with her to speak about surrender to the guru during asana. But in an upcoming post I will explore how I’ve come to understand surrender to a non-enlightened asana teacher. And spoiler alert, I basically don’t think you should surrender to them.

This one goes out to Dennis, who commented on the last post. I started to respond and then it got out of hand and became a post unto itself.

I think he really captured what to look for in a teacher when he said “I’d rather be encouraged and guided to the extent that my limitations will allow” (paraphrasing, here..) But that said, it’s not easy to find your teacher and it might take you a while.

I love lists, so here’s a list of what I look for in a teacher. Keep in mind that I mean this as your primary teacher. Once you start working through stuff and really knowing your own body and how to work with it, you can sample other teachers’ classes without being so concerned with their abilities. So here’s what I look for:

1. The teacher has been teaching for at least ten years. I’m sure there are some gifted ones who have been teaching less than ten years, but they are few and far between. No offense to anyone just starting out. We’ve all been there.

2. Their instructions have a three-dimensional quality that demonstrates an understanding of how the body moves in space.

3. Which means, and more importantly, they actually give instructions. Some teachers call themselves “teachers” but really they mostly call out a choreography. Nothing wrong with that if you know your body and how to move it well. But most of us don’t, myself included–this whole blog is about me figuring out what I’m actually doing in space.

4. Read the bios of teachers on the studio websites. Look for teachers who have done extensive anatomy and/or kinesiology trainings. Look also for teachers who have done more than 200 hours of training (1000 hours or more is more like it) and look for teachers who have other kinds of trainings, like massage therapy, Feldenkreis, Alexander Technique, Body Mind Centering, Shiatsu, Thai Massage, and so on. They would tend to have a more holistic approach to the body and to teaching.

5. If you are OK with hands-on adjustments, look for teachers who have a firm but “listening” hand. The “feel” of it should be that they are more interested in noticing and adjusting for how your body responds to a suggestion for direction in space. They are not pushing you around, but suggesting a direction and verbally checking in with you if things feel unsure to them. I don’t mean that they lightly sort of touch you like a lost and wayward butterfly. You should be able to feel some sort of intention, even if you don’t quite get it yet. The really incredible teachers can change the feel and integrity of your pose with a single index finger. (Those are the 20 year teachers, haha!)

6. There are great teachers in all styles of yoga as far as I can tell. For example, I’m not a huge fan of Bikram, I get screaming mad headaches/migraines from the heat and I’m not into the pushiness of the instruction. However, I did stumble upon a teacher who was really present and self-aware and not pushy. If the heat didn’t kill me I would have kept going back.

7. One of the final exam questions for my Jivamukti training was “What qualifies you to be a yoga teacher?” The answer was, and I’m not joking, “Enlightenment.” Their point was that we as teachers should be meditating and studying the yoga texts and not just treating yoga as aerobics or as a workout. So I would also say that I look for teachers who know their 8 limbs of yoga and their sutras enough that they don’t just quote them or chant them but have a working knowledge of how they function in everyday life. They don’t have to give a dharma talk at the start of class for it to be there, either.

8. Decide what you really are looking for in a teacher and ask for it. If it’s your game, you can ask the universe; in any case if you put that clarity of what you want out there, to your friends, studio owners, etc, you will find what you’re looking for. That’s how I found my asana mentor/teacher.

If you have any qualities you look for, please add to the list!

A dear friend of mine at Little Atom Films shot me practicing yoga for a trial commercial for Chuck Taylors a long while back. 2005, perhaps. It was a lot of fun, but practicing in shoes is a little weird!

Enjoy, and next up is my first experiment with the carrying angle, the angle that a lot of women have at the elbows that can affect the whole practice.

A still from the film:

Standing Split (in some very yellow chucks!) Photo credit is Alex di Suvero.

A few years back I went to a rolfer/structural integration therapist for a whole therapy series to help balance out my crooked hips. I had known for a while that one hip was higher than the other (noticed it in massage school) but hadn’t gotten the chance to figure it out before I had the disc injury, so it got shelved for a long time as something to work on.

Anyway, I had been going for months to a chiropractor, which wasn’t creating any change at all. My sacro-illiac joints were so jammed together (I have X-rays of their total jammed-ness) that he couldn’t get them to move. I asked if the source was muscular, to which he said probably yes, to which I asked should I be getting massage, to which he said probably yes, to which I said, OK, to which he said, I’ll see you next week. Obviously I didn’t go back to him and steered all the money I’d been wasting on the insurance co-pay to the rolfer, instead.

She was fantastic, and helped to create a lot more space in my body. Not all the issues went away; I still can’t lay flat on my back for more than 30 seconds without being in pain in the right SI joint and SI stuff comes up for me a lot in backbending, but she definitely made me less crooked. She’s also a yoga teacher, and happened to fill in at Yogasana where I practice. I hadn’t seen her in a while (having run out of cash to dedicate to self-healing, unfortunately), so I caught up with her after class. I had recently discovered that I have mild scoliosis; I told her my discovery and she said, “Oh, you didn’t know?”

“Ummm, no.”

“I thought you knew you had scoliosis and that’s why you came to me.”

Whoops. Maybe none of my teachers or manual therapists ever told me because they all thought I knew!?! So apparently when I was going to my rolfer to make my hips less crooked, she was seeing a bigger picture. She did a fantastic job, in any case!

So clearly, I haven’t known about my scoliosis for long and I’m still very much learning how to work with it. I do know that it can be very confusing and can greatly distort your sense of where you are in space. It also behaves differently depending on your relationship to gravity, at least it does when it’s functional, like mine, meaning it’s more a result of muscle imbalance than it is actual bone development. Being that this is a work in progress and sometimes hard to show through photos, I thought I would share the aspects of it that I’m clear on, and down the road I’ll have more insights and photos to share.

Here’s me standing in tadasana, not adjusting at all for my spinal curves, and then me doing my best to adjust.

It's not just a hip thing!

Workin' on it...

So the breakdown, according to my teacher Deborah Wolk from Yogasana and Yoga Union for Backcare and Scoliosis, is this:

Right Sacral

Left Lumbar

Right Thoracic

Left Cervical

Apparently in the US, doctors often won’t tell you much more than what’s happening in the lumbar and thoracic, but for many people there’s more going on than just the lateral curves in those two sections of the spine. Left lumbar, right thoracic is common for most women, but where exactly, the degrees, and how it affects the rest of the body can vary quite a bit. For those new to this, “left” and “right” are referencing the left and right sides of the person from their own perspective (i.e. when you look at the pix of me, you have to flip the sides since I have my front to the camera). Left lumbar means the the spine is curving off the midline to the left in the lumbar area, and that part of the back will look more full than it’s mirror side on the other side of the spine. In more detail, left lumbar means the curve of the spine is going to the left, and on the left side of the spine in the lumbar region the back may look more pushed out or convex, whereas on the right side of the spine in the lumbar region the back will look more pushed in, or concave.

When I’m really indulging in my habit patterns, like in the top picture, my ribcage does a little jaunt to the side, which really narrows that right lumbar area. Also if you look at my arms, you can see in the top picture that my right arm is grazing my right hip. This was happening all the time without my being aware of it in an understanding way until after a session with my rolfer when I walked around the room and noticed that my arm wasn’t hitting my hip. And then my thought was, “Cool! She fixed my hips a little,” when really she had been working on my spine!! I had noticed the arm hitting my hip before, but hadn’t really *noticed* it in terms of what it might mean.

Here's handstand, not trying to adjust for the scoliosis. Look how much I'm tilting to the right!

Handstand and other inversions really display the dropping that my body does to the right when I’m upside-down. All the weight of the pose is in my right hand (or right elbow in forearm stand), and in order to not slant and become more vertical I have to lift my right leg and hip much more strongly to the ceiling. The funny thing is I’ve probably been doing handstands that look like that for a long time was not made aware of it until recently. Even as an experienced practitioner, it’s really hard to know where you are in space when you’re upside down, especially because it often *feels* even to you. For newer students it’s even harder, because they are still getting used to the fundamental pieces of the pose and what it’s like to be in it.

Left side...

right side...

In uttanasana you can see the difference in the hips, primarily. The left side is kind of crunched together at the hip crease, and the right side has a disconnected quality. Also you can see on the bottom picture that my torso is leaning to the left, away from my right leg. Often I’ll practice with a small piece of yoga mat rolled up at the left hip joint, which helps with the compression in the left hip joint and helps my torso fall a little more evenly. In the last post, you can see how I used a towel roll to even out both the hips and the lumbar curve.

Not only are hips affected by scoliosis, but shoulders as well. Here I am in chatturanga:

Here are those shoulders again...I'm still waiting for my MRI results for the right shoulder, by the way...

Here I'm adjusting out of my habit pattern. Mostly I'm thinking of broadening the right shoulder blade away from the spine, and turning my sternum to the left a little bit.

My shoulders are a bit of a mystery to me at the moment…At times I think I understand how to work with the imbalance, but then I’m not so sure. Once I know what’s happening in the right shoulder it might make a little more sense.

And finally, here’s uttanasana. One of the classic poses used to look at scoliosis. Often as the back muscles unwind in this pose, functional scoliosis will start to become harder to see. But here you can absolutely see my right hip is higher and my torso is doing that diagonal to the left that it loves to do. But then somehow my head and shoulders have ended up back to the right side. Hello confusing. It’s most likely me trying to come back to center but moving from the wrong place.

Uttanasana

It’s going to be confusing for a good long while, I’m sure. I’m so happy to be aware of it, though, and looking forward to sharing more.

Up next is a break from the confusion…Feet!

The season is upon us and there’s nothing like having a million things to do, like traveling, entertaining, eating holiday treats and/or skipping your favorite yoga class for office and family parties to make you feel a little sore and stiff. There’s no silver bullet to feeling great, but this gem of a pose comes pretty close. It’s a simple half downward dog, or Ardha Adho Mukha Svanasana, and it’s brilliant for tractioning your spine and lengthening your whole torso. If  you’ve got a table or countertop in your house, you’re all set. Now all you have to do is clear off any clutter; this pose doubles as a surefire way to help keep your space clean and clutter free. Clear space equals clear mind, at least in my book.

Here’s me practicing with our ubiquitous metal table that seems to have been made for this pose:

This is the set-up I like the best. I prefer my feet wide enough to connect to the edges of the table legs, but my arms at shoulder width. You can also work with your feet hip distance apart and the hands holding the sides of the table. Whatever your choice, make sure you are stretching out evenly with your limbs equidistant from your midline.

Now you might be thinking, “My table/counter is too tall/too short or too round.” You want the height of the table top to reach the level of your hip creases. (Where is that? Stand and lift one leg up and bend the knee. Where there’s a big crease, at the top 0f your thigh bone, that’s the hip crease.) If your table is too tall, simply stand on yoga blocks, books, or pieces of wood to make yourself the right height. Make sure both feet are lifted the same amount. If your table is too short, you could put it up on lifts (that would be the hard way) or layer some blankets on it until it’s the right height. If it’s round, my best guess is that you could practice with the midline of the pelvis at the table, though I can’t speak from experience. If you try it, let me know how it works out!

Now you also might be thinking, “My table/counter is too long.” There’s a fix for that…look at the right-hand side of the picture below:

Using a strap can make a table that's too long for you accessible. However, now as I study these pictures I can see the blankets sliding towards my hands, perhaps because I'm holding the strap and not the table. If you find that happening, try putting your yoga mat along the whole length of the table and everything should stay put.

You can securely attach a strap to the table in a big loop, and hold onto the loop. If you don’t have a strap, you could hold the ends of a long belt or thick piece of rope. Be creative! After all, you are using your dining table as a yoga prop…

Here’s a better look at the strap:

It's best if you can place the strap in a way that it won't pull you to one side. By the way, that horizontal line running across the table that looks like part of the strap is only a reflection. I apologize for the optical illusion.

If it’s your counter that is too long, look to see if there is any secure hardware nearby that you could use to thread the strap through. Just make sure you are able to hold the strap in a way that your arms are reaching out equidistant from the midline of your body. Otherwise you might not be headed towards balancing the length of your spine. If your table’s too short lengthwise, just bend your elbows out to the side. You’ll still get quite a stretch through your spine. Make sure you don’t hunch your shoulders to your ears when you bend your elbows.

Now though I might not look like I’m doing much in the pictures, I’m actually working to keep my feet spreading out with even weight on the floor and I’m reaching my arms as long as I can, with my fingers wrapped around the end of the table. The table is right at my hip creases and I’m trying to get as much of my hands as I can over the ledge, without stressing or struggling. My tail is reaching away from my hands and my hands from my tail.

You can’t see your feet in this pose, so set them up as well as you can, heels in line with the second and third toes, feet parallel. Do your best to keep them that way as you hang out in the pose, but as you can see from the pictures my toes started to turn out wider than my heels. If your feet turn in or out, no big deal. That’s just extra info for you and directions your body tends to go in. Make a mental note and see how that tendency expresses in other poses.

You might be wondering what all the extra stuff is. This stuff:

These are the props I was using that you can't fully see when I'm in the pose.

These are more props that I’m using to make the pose the most effective I can—two small, rolled-up towels and two yoga blankets (any blankets will work well as long as they are not puffy or too scratchy.) I’m using the blankets to both raise the height of my table to my hip creases, as well as to create a soft surface to rest my forehead on. Metal tables are not exactly warm and cozy. The white towel was in my hip crease at the front ledge of the table, not on the table but in front of it, helping to take some of the excess compression out of my left hip (which I will talk about in my next post) and to help balance out the right sacral curve. The yellow towel was under the right side of my belly next to my lumbar spine, to help balance out my left lumbar curve. (See the next post for more on scoliosis!)

Give it a try! Let me know your successes and fails, and any ideas you have to make this amazing pose even better!

Happy Solstice, Holy Days, Holidays, Holidaze, and anything else you celebrate!

Yesterday morning while I was getting ready to teach a yoga class, our brand new kitten Pirate jumped out of the litter box and started scooting across the floor on her butt. Anyone who has dogs or cats knows what this means; to put it nicely, there was something that she was having a hard time pooping out. She very kindly left it in the middle of the living room floor, and when I went to clean it up I noticed some long threads coming out and some weird shapes in it. If you are a paranoid, thorough cat nuturer like myself, your first instinct is to paw through the sh*t to figure out what on earth your kitten ate so that you can keep them from eating it again.

It was no easy task. Gloves on, nose tense, I brought the mystery poo to the sink to figure it out. I pulled out some thread strands that led to denser strands, like fabric pieces. My brain was trying to match them to toys the cats have been playing with, or ornaments they might have knocked off the tree. No match so far. And then a square piece of something that was most definitely Velcro. Not cool.

Pirate working on her cute posing skills.

I left the mystery treasures in the bathroom and wandered around the house, looking for a match. I finally traced the threads and fabric to the rug in our kitchen, one of those hand-made Amish rugs that are basically old fabric in strips, woven together. The kitten has been teething, and she must have been chewing on the rug.  And there it was, a gnawed on rug corner. So of course I pulled the rug up and hid it  away, but there was still the matter of the Velcro.

After much searching, it turns out that Pirate had chewed some Velcro off of one of the guitar cables in the music room, a place that is off-limits—it’s impossible keep cats out of rooms they aren’t supposed to be in!! Again, not cool, but at least it hadn’t caused any problems.

Mystery solved! It reminded me a lot of this mantra:

Asato Ma Sat Gamaya    Lead me from the unreal to the real,

Tamaso Ma Jyotir Gamaya   from darkness to the light,

Mrityor Ma Amritham Gamaya   from fear of death to knowledge of immortality.

We all have mystery sh*t that we don’t really feel like sorting through. We all have that stuff that we don’t want to look at. It’s muddy, or makes us feel bad, or it just stinks. And we think that we are the only ones, that everyone else has it sorted out. That couldn’t be further from the truth. In all our heads most of the time some kind of sh*t is hitting the proverbial fan. One way to get work with it is to relax the body, sit down, shut up, and look within. For real. Not like all hippy dippy look within yourself for the truth with some daisies in your hair and peace out man, but rather admit that we all have sh*t with little gems hidden inside, and those gems can lead us to a deeper understanding.

Once I solved the kitten mystery, I had barely any time to shower and get to class. I wanted to teach the meaning of Asato Ma from this experience, but I have to be a little more mentally prepared if I’m going to walk into class and talk about my cat’s poo. But lo and behold, it was street cleaning day, and per usual, instead of the street cleaning machines picking up all the leaves and garbage, they had strewn it all over and made a bigger mess than had been there before.

In the rotting-leaf and trash strewn streets of Brooklyn was my more palatable dharma talk. That when we do this inner work, when we look at our sh*t, it often gets messier before it gets clarified, from Asat or untruth to Sat, or truth. Sitting with ourselves and listening to our thoughts and really seeing them, not dismissing them but not obsessively following them either, is a process. Observing how our body is feeling in direct relationship to those thoughts and to the gems that surface out of all the crap, and then softening the tension that arises in the body, is a process. Accepting that we are all mostly full of sh*t, is a process.  When we accept it, when we soften, when we do the work, then the light, the Jyotir, comes.

One of my shoulders has always been a little weaker than the other, and I’m not sure but I think that years of chatturanga plus scoliosis without being aware of how to modify created a constantly sore right shoulder. It was often fine, but every once in a while would flare up.  A couple years ago I heard/felt it “pop” when lifting into lolasana, and since then it was never quite the same. It was consistently achey, and on really bad days the range of motion in my shoulder was quite restricted. But it also had it’s good days, and I treated it with massage, acupuncture, and careful yoga practice.

Here's what my shoulders look like in chatturanga when I don't work to balance them a little more.

Finally I gave in and got a referral to a shoulder specialist, namely an orthopaedic doctor of sports medicine, ligament reconstruction of the knee & shoulder, and joint replacement. The cool thing was that xrays were done and their results sent to the doctor via computer immediately. There was nothing structurely remarkable, except he did say that my right clavicle has like a funny little extension/ski bump on the end of it. I wish I could post the xrays. They gave me a copy on CD, but it’s only good for PC and our house is entirely Mac. If I figure out how I’ll add them later.

After some muscle testing and range of movement exercises, he said I might have a labral tear (a tear in the connective tissue in the shoulder socket) and that the next step is to get an MRI. When I asked him about shoulder functionality in relationship to scoliosis and how I’ve been thinking a lot lately of the right scapula coming laterally to meet the humerus and the left scapula moving more medially towards my spine to create balance across the sternum, he said “I don’t know about scoliosis and shoulders. It’s probably a labral tear.”

Ummm. OK. So I continued, saying it almost always got rid of the pain when I moved in that way rather than just using my body any which way.

Blank stare.

Then he says, “We like to think of the shoulder joint like a seal balancing a ball on its nose. The scapula is the seal. The ball is the humerus.”

“Cool.”

“So you can imagine.”

I’m waiting for him to go on.

He says, “You need to strengthen the shoulder rotators.”

“Which ones?”

“You know, like rowing and pull-ups. The traps and rhomboids.”

I’m trying to imagine myself on a rowing machine, and how that’s just not going to happen. “Well I have been working on serratus,” I say.

“Good.” Blank stare.

Me again, “So are you saying I need to balance all of the muscles around each scapula?”

“Yes.”

Me, in my head, “But you’re not really going to tell me which ones are strong and which are weak based on the testing you just did.” It was like pulling teeth to get him to say anything. I could tell he had been trying to back out of the room for the past five minutes. I think he must have thought that he would tell me to get an MRI and I would say OK and then he could leave. So then the seal analogy must have exhausted him.

Where I am uncertain is what he meant by he “didn’t know about the shoulders and scoliosis.” His words meant that he just didn’t have that information. His tone of voice meant that he didn’t believe there was any relationship. Which is mind-blowing. How is it possible that one could think there’d be no relationship? It’s like looking at a map of the globe and not admitting that Africa used to nestle in the space between North and South America. How can any doctor who has studied in detail the incredible amazingness that is the human body not believe that everything in the body is intimately related??

The sad thing is I’ve had similar experiences with other surgeons, who always seem to be crabby and in a rush. The woman who diagnosed my L5/S1 disc herniation spent two minutes with me. She tapped my ankle and knee with a rubber hammer and wrote me an MRI script and left. The whole time she acted like I was annoying her just by being in her office. Meanwhile I’d been in the worst pain in my life for almost a week waiting just to get that appointment.

I know there are good doctors out there who actually deserve the money that they make. Unfortunately, they are hard to find. I’m sure this guy I just saw is a great surgeon. Maybe they should have an intermediary person who is a better interface with the patient, and then if surgery is what needs to happen, then you call in the crabby one and they get the job done while you’re under anesthesia and don’t have to talk to them.

When I first trained at Jivamukti back in ’99, all of us TTs drew a line down the center of our mats to help with foot alignment in standing poses. Once that mat was shredded from practicing up to 2 or 3 classes a day, I had to let it go and moved on to a fresh mat with no lines. I figured I had done all the foot aligning I needed and the lines would be superfluous. Who knows if I was right at the time, but now, over ten years later, the lines are coming back! And they aren’t just for standing poses anymore.

Take the time to measure and draw your lines correctly. Otherwise you will encourage some new imbalanced habits!

A strap is a way to mark your mat without leaving marks...Be sure to place it in the midline. If you really want to make sure it stays steady, put sandbags, cork blocks, or a heavy book on either tail to weigh it down. (Just don't put the weights on or close to your mat for obvious reasons.)

When you have any kind of imbalances, joint issues, scoliosis, etc (and who doesn’t!?), having lines on your mat is a very simple way to put yourself on the grid so that you know where you are in space. The more we practice, the more we can solidify our habit patterns without knowing that they are there. As a teacher I see all the time beginners and advanced students alike using their mat in an unbalanced way. In Adho Mukha Svanasana, for example (downward dog), hands are going one way, feet another, and the torso from hips to shoulders is diagonal or bending to the side. This may sound nit-picky to some, but practicing in an uneven fashion can bring similar results that sitting at your desk slumped at the chest or holding your child on the same hip all day can bring.

Yoga is about awareness and moving out of avidya, or ignorance, and you may be surprised at how different you feel when you put yourself on the grid. You may feel relieved or a sense of comfort, or you may feel completely thrown off what you thought was your center. Give it time and your inner compass and your experience of where you are in space will reset to a more truthful place.

Try this:

1. Use a tape measure, straight edge, and sharpie to mark a line straight down the middle of your mat. If you want to keep your mat unmarked, use a belt or a piece of string instead to mark the midline.

2. Stand in tadasana (mountain pose) at the front of your mat with your heels and the center of your ankles in line with each other, with the midline of the mat exactly between your feet.

3. Close your eyes.

4. Practice a couple rounds of your favorite Surya Namaskar, yes with your eyes closed. (Don’t cheat by feeling for the belt or the edges of your mat with your hands or feet.)

5. Come back to tadasana.

6. Open your eyes and see where you are on your mat and in relation to the midline of the mat.

7. Do this once more, this time with eyes open. Observe where your feet and hands land at the top and back of your mat as you go through your series. Do your best to practice without changing your habits. In other words, don’t try to align yourself with the midline of the mat.

8. Now take a round or two, using the midline of the mat to align your hands and feet equidistant from the midline. Take note of how this practice feels.

What I found is that my body moves on a diagonal, so that when I step or jump back, my feet are always moving to the right. However, when I step or jump forward, my feet always move more to the left. In other words, I start and end in more or less the same place on the mat, but in between I am working sideways! (Which means when I do this practice with eyes closed, I think that I’m working in a balanced way. It’s a whole different story with my eyes open.) When I align more with the midline of the mat, suddenly my shoulders feel different, my right shoulder has to take some responsibility for Adho Mukha Svanasana especially, and it can’t just hide out and give the left shoulder all the work. It does the same for my legs, but the reverse. Suddenly the left leg needs to be more aware and the right leg and hip can’t control everything.

Try it and let me know what you think!