Kim 

I find that I have an aversion to balancing postures….especially teaching balancing. I have a really hard time with them as I find myself not being able to maintain balance. I used to make lots of excuses to myself why I can’t seem to balance…I had lots of middle ear infections as a child, I once had a concussion and surely that is why I cannot balance, the highlights in my hair have gone to my brain!!!!

Caitlin

In my practice I tend to avoid restorative yoga. I think the reason why is the physical aspect of yoga. Even knowing the benefits of restorative yoga, I am so busy with work and family, the time I make for yoga I tend  to make it a more physical practice. It is somewhat ironic because I do believe restorative is most beneficial to anyone with a busy life or hectic mind. Part of my strategy in making time for restorative is to add it into my home practice. I try to take time either at the beginning or end. I am always happy when I do!

Ann

As a newer student of yoga, I was more prone to aversion.  Judith Lasater’s advice has been, “Pick a posture you hate and practice it every day for two weeks.  See what happens after the two weeks are up.”  So I followed that advice and it worked pretty well.  I did dislike revolved triangle when I first began practicing, and now it is one of my favorite poses.

These days, I don’t feel that I avoid or dislike any of them; I sometimes have to plan better so I can be sure to get to everything I want in the practice time I’ve allotted.  Often I wrap up my practice and think, “Rats! Wanted to include [this one]!”  And I tend to get fixated for long-ish periods of time on certain postures or posture groups, to the exclusion of others.  But for me, now  it’s more a question of time or focus than one of active aversion.  I figure that in time I will get back to postures that I haven’t practiced in awhile, and sometimes they seem like old friends, and sometimes they seem brand new.

Stacey (Hugues)

Balance poses – I just don’t love doing them and often don’t work them into my personal practice…but when I don’t do them I definitely notice I feel less overall clarity and more distracted in my day to day.  I feel less awareness about my body and the space I’m in.  so when I notice this I try to do more.  Lately I’ve been practicing balance poses with my daughter – which has been fun but also good for both of us because she is a lot like me!

Mid

I generally have an aversion to…discomfort, and my asana practice is teaching me to to distinguish between the different flavors it comes in.

As someone who frequently walks and bikes,  I find bow pose pretty uncomfortable – takes a ton of effort and doesn’t feel very good.  But this kind of discomfort is worth leaning into, I’m learning, because the pose is slowly making me more  flexible in my quads and groin.  Also, I’m discovering a kind of vitality in the gut when I do the pose.

On the other hand, when I have tugged persistently for weeks at my hamstrings or shoulders in uttanasana or eagle pose, it has led to chronic aches that have taken months to go away.  Persisting in the face of that kind of discomfort isn’t a good thing – even though the physical sensation feels kind of similar to the discomfort of bow pose.

The real benefit of this for me is that I seem to be carrying this lesson over into different parts of my life.  As my yoga practice evolves, I’m learning to distinguish between the different flavors of discomfort in my work, relationships, and even in my beliefs.  This is what keeps it interesting for me – to learn when to hang in there and when to turn away.

Fay

I sometimes tend to avoid doing restorative poses.  I have a belief that if I’m not “working hard enough” in my physical asana practice with the more active poses that I’m not progressing.  This is my ego talking!  Then, I think about the question of what progression in my yoga practice really means to me.

Does advancement on the yoga path mean getting better at doing more or better poses OR does it mean being able to connect with that awake, aware, non-judgemental part of myself that I think of as my authentic Self and being able to live in the world happily and making my contribution to life by following my Dharma, my purpose?   For me, its the latter and a restorative practice can bring me back to that connection with Self in a big way.   If I can just get over the hump of starting!   When I win the struggle with my ego and am finally on the mat doing a restorative practice, its such a relief to lay aside all the effort of doing and REST, remembering who I really am.

“Spiritual” lines of clothing promoted by manifestly soul-less companies, a chock-full meditation class in the heart of the dairy-belt, a movie starlet glibly declaring that yoga poses are about 2000 years old (recent scholarship demonstrates most aren’t much more than 100).

“I wonder why is it that way!?” the author chuckles, scratching her head. And her iconoclastic answers, like Columbo’s, are supported by evidence most of us wouldn’t even think of. A poli-sci-professor-turned yogi, Ms. Horton liberally buttresses her own thoughts with the most up-to-date scholarship about yoga as well as insights from other cultural greats who range from Jung and Thoreau to the creator of Nike’s “Just do it” campaign.

In essay after essay, Ms. Horton raises tough questions about modern yoga and then skillfully goes through the evidence. When the only honest answers are full of ambiguities, she isn’t afraid to say so. I love that!

Take her essays on the history of yoga. There’s a brief discussion of the archeological basis for yoga’s ancient origins. (It’s inconclusive—and what a relief it is to have someone say so.) Then she tells us how Swami Vivekananda brought his vision of yoga to the United States at the turn of the 20^th century—the singular “big bang” event from which all of western yoga has arguably proceeded*.  At the end, having painted the picture of yoga’s history in broad and clear strokes, she creates a conceptual frame to hang it in. It’s a frame that highlights the best features in the picture, gives it new meaning.

Which is that we really don’t know much for certain about the ancient antecedents of modern yoga. But we do know for sure, even amidst the delightful ambiguities in yoga’s history, that we share with our ancient forbears a desire to practice something that helps us to grow. And we also know that contemporary yoga reflects our uniquely modern character: it is freely available worldwide and practiced by tens of millions of people; it blends spirituality with modern science. In this way, our yoga builds upon but is different than anything that came before it. These are roots and differences that would make any practicing yogi proud.

This kind of insight characterizes Ms. Horton’s writing elsewhere in the book. Her essays run the gamut of modern concerns from consumerism to body image to psychotherapy, each one delivering fresh insights in a succinct and thoughtful package. And underneath all of them, which makes the book a real delight to read, is a kind of wonderment about the whole shebang of modern yoga.

Here’s how she says it in one of her final essays:

 ”When practiced in a way that integrates body, mind, and breath, yoga offers an accessible means of developing an infinitely more healthy and empowering relationship to the body….Even within our soulless landscape of parking lots, prefab buildings, post-industrial detritus, and big-box stores, reconnecting with the deep inner experience of our own embodiment enables us to discover that the world really does retain its essential mystery and magic.”

Amen to that! It’s why I do yoga, and I’ll bet the same is true for millions of others. And so, to this and so much else in the book, one can only thank Ms. Horton. Thanks  for getting it so right, so clearly and for putting it out there for all of us to read.

Yoga PhD: Integrating the Life of the Mind and the Wisdom of the Body is available from Amazon in paperback or Kindle.

* For more about on this subject, Elizabeth DeMichelis’s A History of Modern Yoga provides a fascinating and nuanced account of Vivekananda’s impact.  Ms. Horton’s summary presents essentially the same case in a few lucid pages.

When I heard there was a new translation and commentary of course I had to grab a copy.

I’ve just finished Threads of Yoga: A Remix of Patanjali’s Sutras with Commentary and Reverie. Original, insightful and beautiful, this is the most modern commentary I’ve read.

Reading its self-published pages, I felt as though Matthew Remski had given Patanjali a shave and haircut—the dusty old monk—and then dressed him in eco-chic loungewear and sat him down to talk with me over coffee.

If you know about the Yoga Sutras, I think you should get your hands on a copy of Remski’s book. Really. It’s the only edition I’ve read that…

1. Gets me through the second half of the Sutras without falling asleep.
2. Names the secret ingredient I always knew Patanjali left out of his sauce.
3. Grabs my ear with language as beautiful as the sounds of Sanskrit.
4. Lights sparks for me over and over again by striking Patanjali’s flint with the steel of modern science and philosophy.
5. Shows me how to reject and love a spiritual text at the same time.

Here’s what I mean, point-by-point:

1. On staying awake through the end of the movie.

I like the Sutras. A lot. But every time I get close to Pada Three, I feel like I’m catching the flu. Thanks, but I really don’t want to fly, inhabit someone else’s body, or shrink to the size of a pixel.

On goes Netflix; I’d rather watch the latest Avengers sequel. That’s what I like about Remski’s book—unlike most translations I’ve seen, his rendition of Chapter three does not read like a comic book!

Leading up to the Sutra saying yogis can fly, for example, he points out that Patanjali probably never saw anyone do that. (Like, c’mon, Mr. P!) And then, his translation delivers the following beautiful refraction, which I really can believe: “Movement feels like flight when the flesh is wedded to space.”

Unlike the original, this translation radiates a truth I have tasted in my own asana practice; it glows more brightly every time I read the words. Threads of Yoga does this time after time—it tames the hyperboles of Chapter Three, reducing them to honest and beautiful insights. This alone made the read worthwhile for me. It got me to the end of Pada Three without losing my faith.

2. What’s missing from that sauce, anyway?

Besides Pada Three, something else has always bothered me about Patanjali’s Sutras; the word “love” isn’t anywhere in it.

Make no mistake about it, the Sutras put us on an elevated highway to liberation; they’re built to whisk us above the messy landscapes of life.

An honest reading of Patanjali, in my opinion, acknowledges that the yamas are mainly designed as an entry ramp where we come up to cruising speed. And this bugs me to pieces, because as much as I like the Sutras, I relish even more the love affair I’m having with my world (even though we have a quarrelsome relationship.) Say what you will about eternity; my particular soul needs the smell of dirt.

To fix the flat taste, Remski stirs relationships and love into his translations of the Sutras. And he further spices that with a moral imperative for the modern yogi: unless we engage in conscious and loving relationships with the beings around us, we have no hope of healing our our injured planet, not to mention our own psyches.

For example, in the original sutra about sauca (purity) most translations give us something like “Seek that purity which leads to disgust for one’s own body and for contact with others.” Ugh!!!

But Remski steps up with a variant I can get behind: “Ecology allows you to honor your flesh and the flesh of others.” Or on an esoteric sutra describing samadhi (sometimes translated as “integration”), he comments, “The highest form of integration, in my view, would be saturated with feelings of love.”

For this American yogi, it’s a relief to experience such caring and tenderness in a rendition of the Sutras; it shows me a deeper path into Patanjali’s truths.

3. How words can sing from the page.

As Remski brings relationships with people and our planet closer to the center of Patanjali’s sphere, he holds the master with a special kind of respect.

Remski describes his own project with the Sutras as  “equal parts homage, adventure, reclamation and pleasure.” It’s a brilliant mission statement, if you ask me.

Following through, he goes on to brightly illuminate the qualities that have made the Sutras endure. He also offers resonant and compassionate explanations of the cultural setting of Patanajali’s time, which for me go a long way toward explaining the parts of the Sutras that stick in my craw.

Above all (and perhaps explaining it), Remski has an ear for the beauty of the language in the Sutras. I haven’t found any other translator whose own language rivets and mesmerizes my ear like the original Sanskrit does.

In a beautiful reflection on the sutra about “om,” for example, Remski rhapsodizes “I am nostalgic for the intimacy of an oral culture in which sounds were felt to be creative; perhaps as I am nostalgic for the joy I felt when learning to speak.” Or later, “Words about god can throw us, as they break, into a love for wisdom.”

Wow—thanks for putting it that way.

4. Polishing old doorknobs with a new cloth.

Most of the commentaries I have read do a pretty good job of explaining Patanjali and his commentators into contemporary English. Threads of Yoga does that too, but then it goes further, investigating how modern thinkers echo the old guys, or more interestingly, how they contradict them.

To read Remski’s commentary is to enter a friendly conversation between the old master and number of the esteemed psychologists, philosophers and neurologists of our own age. (To drop some of the names: the philosophers Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Derrida, novelist Jorge Luis Borges, psychoneurologist Julian Jaynes…)

These modern luminaries create a particularly beautiful and insightful light in which to re-consider Patanjali’s long-archived perspective. It’s one I plan to revisit, through the nice bibliography at the back of the book.

5. “I’m arguing with you because I love you.”

Every once in awhile, a family event compels me to go to church. Once I get in, my experience follows a familiar pattern. Initially, it’s delightful—the service returns me to feelings and early memories that I love; I feel calm and uplifted.

Inevitably we’ll get to those places in the ceremony where I’m thinking, “I can’t believe I’m sitting here nodding my head to words that I know are not true. And there’s no way I’m going to say them with my own lips!!!” These places in the liturgy make me want jump up and bolt out of the building; I left the faith as soon in my life as I realized I had a choice.

I recently asked my sister how she reconciled her faith, which has grown stronger over the years, with the impossible statements in the texts and services we grew up with.

She’s wicked smart, and a minister—and she had a good answer. She told me that faith is a verb for her; it’s an action in which an essential element is struggling with the parts of the doctrine she can’t believe. The struggle defines her; she couldn’t have faith without it.

It would be, I suppose, like trying to build muscle without having a weight set.

This kind of struggle seems to lie at the heart of Threads of Yoga. Remski often argues with Patanjali—compellingly and eloquently. He rejects the stubborn asceticism in the Sutras, for example, labeling it a “subtractive suicide of the flesh.”

Where Patanjali famously says that future pain can be avoided, Remski counters “I cannot imagine any part of life that is not growing and learning, stimulated by dissatisfaction and impeded by struggle.” He blasts the Sutras’ most central claim that truth lies within us: “Nobody has the truth. Truth is the product of sharing what seems to be true.”

Remski’s wrestling matches with Patanjali remind me of my sister’s struggles with the liturgy of our church. Although he’s arguing with Patanjali, the author’s deeper purpose seems to be to define himself. He seems to grow in the process, drawing himself  closer to Patanjali even as he asserts their differences.

We participate vicariously in this individuation, the hatching of a modern yogi from Patanjali’s beautiful egg.

To re-spin the delightful turn of phrase I quoted earlier, Remski’s words about Patanjali throw us, as they break, into a deeper love for the Sutras. And this, if you ask me, is a wonderful model for any long-term love affair…with a text, a tradition or a person.

6. The fine print.

I’m averse to raving on about anything for very long without pointing out its negatives. But I have to say that for me, Remski’s book didn’t have any negatives.

In case your  brain doesn’t have the same peculiar wrinkles as mine, I’ll give you a few caveats—please note that this is here because it’s a mandatory paragraph and the words are in fine print.

My own ear, voice and heart, love the sound of words. If yours doesn’t, you may not enjoy the book as much as I did—to me, one of Remski’s most distinctive qualities is his lyrical voice.

Also science, philosophy and psychotherapy tickle my interest. If they’re a turnoff for you, then some of the book may leave you flat.

And finally, I am someone who has read the Sutras before. If you haven’t read them yourself you might not want to start with this version—you won’t appreciate how wonderful Threads of Yoga is.

Go and try one of the alternatives, then come back to this one—I think you’ll be glad you did.

Mid Walsh

“I wonder why is it that way!?” the author chuckles, scratching her head. And her iconoclastic answers, like Columbo’s, are supported by evidence most of us wouldn’t even think of. A poli-sci-professor-turned yogi, Ms. Horton liberally buttresses her own thoughts with the most up-to-date scholarship about yoga as well as insights from other cultural greats who range from Jung and Thoreau to the creator of Nike’s “Just do it” campaign.

In essay after essay, Ms. Horton raises tough questions about modern yoga and then skillfully goes through the evidence. When the only honest answers are full of ambiguities, she isn’t afraid to say so. I love that!

Take her essays on the history of yoga.  There’s a brief discussion of the archeological basis for yoga’s ancient origins. (It’s inconclusive – and what a relief it is to have someone say so.)  Then she tells us how Swami Vivekananda brought his vision of yoga to the United States at the turn of the 20^th century – the singular “big bang” event from which all of western yoga has arguably proceeded*.  At the end, having painted the picture of yoga’s history in broad and clear strokes, she creates a conceptual frame to hang it in.  It’s a frame that highlights the best features in the picture, gives it new meaning.

Which is that we really don’t know much for certain about the ancient antecedents of modern yoga.  But we do know for sure, even amidst the delightful ambiguities in yoga’s history, that we share with our ancient forbears a desire to practice something that helps us to grow.  And we also know that contemporary yoga reflects our uniquely modern character: it is freely available worldwide and practiced by tens of millions of people; it blends spirituality with modern science.  In this way our yoga is builds upon but is different than anything that came before it.  These are roots and differences that would make any practicing yogi proud.

This kind of insight characterizes Ms. Horton’s writing elsewhere in the book.  Her essays run the gamut of modern concerns from consumerism to body image to psychotherapy, each one delivering fresh insights in a succinct and thoughtful package.  And underneath all of them, which makes the book a real delight to read, is a kind of wonderment about the whole shebang of modern yoga.

Here’s how she says it in one of her final essays.  ” When practiced in a way that integrates body, mind, and breath, yoga offers an accessible means of developing an infinitely more healthy and empowering relationship to the body….Even within our soulless landscape of parking lots, prefab buildings, post-industrial detritus, and big-box stores, reconnecting with the deep inner experience of our own embodiment enables us to discover that the world really does retain its essential mystery and magic.”

Amen to that!  It’s why I do yoga, and I’ll bet the same is true for millions of others.  And so, to this and so much else in the book, one can only thank Ms. Horton.  Thanks  for getting it so right, so clearly, and for putting it out there for all of us to read.

* For more about on this subject, Elizabeth DeMichelis’s A History of Modern Yoga provides a fascinating and nuanced account of Vivekananda’s impact.  Ms. Horton’s summary presents essentially the same case in a few lucid pages.

Holiday Sale on class passes
5 class pass $65 ($15 savings)      purchase
5 class pass seniors/students $60 ($5 savings)   purchase
10 class pass $125 ($15 savings)   purchase
10 class pass Seniors/Students $105   ($5 savings)   purchase

3 months of unlimited classes $250 pre-paid

Gift certificates are available in any amount and can be purchased online and printed out at home!  They’re the perfect stocking stuffer for the yogi or would-be yogi on your shopping list….even at the last minute.   Click here to purchase!

How about you…what’s on your yoga gift list this holiday season???

$5
a box of incense for practice-time
Fay recommends Tara Healing or Kyoto Moon
from IncenseWarehouse.com

$10 
8′ cotton yoga strap
Available from you-know-where :>)

$11
Stephen Cope’s Yoga and the Quest for the True Self
an easy, accessible and illuminating read about the experience of yoga
from Amazon.com

$22
Eco-friendly renewable cork yoga blocks
Available in a crow’s nest near you

$39.95
Yoga Toes
Fay’s recommended home pinky spa. Helps cure hammer toes, sore feet.

$50-75
Yoga Wear from SATYA or Be Present available in Fay’s green yoga boutique

$109.95
Meditation timer
This wooden one has been a standby at Mid’s and Fay’s house for years. Quiet, reliable, and beautiful.
From nowandzen.com

In a unique partnership with the yoga resource YogaUOnline, Kate Krumsiek introduced Judith Lasater’s online classes, ‘Structuring Your Class for Beginners’ and ‘Teaching Yoga to Beginners’.  Judith Lasater is a teacher of international reknown, particularly for her advocacy of restorative  yoga.

Discussion followed Kate’s presentation, with group members sharing their experience and wisdom gleaned from practicing and instructing yoga.

Here are the materials from the session:

• Judith Lasater’s  Top 10 things to keep in mind when working with beginners, along with some other observations from Kate.
• A summary of beginner’s alignment trouble spots and solutions, as described by Judith.
• three sequences for beginners from Judith’s class.

Through our partnership with YogaU online, Dancing Crow Yoga is pleased to provide our students a 20% discount on any YogaU materials.  Call or email the studio to take advantage of this discount,   at 781-836-5150 or crowmail@dancingcrowyoga.com.

Presentation
PS The presentation is also available  here as a Powerpoint slide show.  Once you download it, this file should display on any computer, including the animations in the slide show.