Tag Archives: Breathing

On My Mind

New Body Yoga

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No bending over, no engaging the abs, no twisting.

No inversions, no backbends, no planks.

Welcome to prenatal yoga, where it’s all about space, lengthening, and breath.

In some twist of fate, the yoga teacher who comes to my school once a week is also certified in prenatal yoga, and she has been kind enough to modify our usual class for me. As this is a teacher who knows me and how my body is used to moving, I feel very safe in her hands.

I love yoga for many reasons and have been practicing regularly for over fifteen years. I love the way it has helped me get to know my body, what it has shown my body to do, and the way my breathing has changed as a result. That’s what yoga is, really; breathing, and letting the breath move the body.

As I’ve learned more about yoga as a practice and as I’ve become stronger and more experienced, I’ve recognized different purposes in yoga, and they have applied to different points of my life. I’ve done yoga for the purpose of getting stronger, for learning to breathe, for slowing down, for healing, and for learning to work with discomfort.

And now, I’m doing yoga to encourage the changes taking place in my body, to help it lengthen, open, and create space. As my belly grows, the pace of yoga postures slows down, the breathing practice deepens, and concentration shifts from breath to body and back to breath. Working on the breath is no longer a means to find the deepest core of myself, but also to welcome the being that is becoming.

“I know it’s boring,” my teacher said at the beginning. “But you’ll get bigger and you’ll see.”

Used to feeling my body move and stretch and knowing how to use the breath as a way to move the body, it was boring. And then I stopped focusing on what I couldn’t do any more and started focusing on the purpose: lengthen, open, create space, breathe.

Yoga was no longer boring.

Used to coming home feeling stretched and strong, a rubber band played with, twisted, pulled, I began coming home feeling relaxed, calmer, my hips and lower back able to move more fluidly. I’ve been tired at the end of the day in a way that I’ve never been tired before, and it was yoga that reminded me why.

Yoga is like meditation in the sense that we practice. It is a continuous doing without a done, without a stopping point, without a natural break. Yoga is a flow. It is about welcoming what is, where it is, how it is. And now, it is about welcoming what will be.

Lengthen. Open. Create space.

Breathe.

Ubud, Bali, Indonesia – February 2016
On My Mind

Take a Moment

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I woke this morning early, heart beating hard and mind picking right back up from either a dream or the events left over from the night before – it was hard to say. When changing positions in bed and a sip of water brought nothing, it was time to get up, despite the early hour I made out through the glow of my old running watch, fumbling for the correct button.

I took myself to the sunniest spot in our small apartment and did yoga as the sky changed. I made a glaze for the date and nut bars that had cooled overnight, poured my coffee, and took my book outside onto the balcony. Our balcony is the last to be kissed by the morning sun and while the neighbours’ laundry had surely dried, I bundled into a jacket and let the sun gently bring me into the day.

It was hard, actually.

I was antsy, uncertain, energetic, and had far too much on my mind to sit there as calmly and quietly as it may have seemed. Even while doing yoga, I had thought of lists to do, weighed scenarios in my mind, and pushed myself time and again back to my intention – be here now. On the balcony, I let my book focus my attention, let the feeling of the chair pressing into the backs of my legs keep me anchored to where I was.

As is often the case, the uneasiness dissipated as the sun moved higher in the sky. Along with it, I felt better as dawn became day. The concerns I’d had were logical, systematic, manageable. The beating of my heart slowed down, the anxiety I’d felt crushing my chest upon waking drifted off and settled somewhere out of reach.

When such feelings flickered again later, as feelings often do, I looked for the breath I was supposed to find during yoga. I looked for the breath that had been elusive in the moment, and waited as years of practice called it back when I took a step back and closed my eyes. I smiled instead of settling into the negative emotion and felt the emotion loosen its grip. That’s not always the right response, but that was what this moment required. There would be an opportunity to revisit later on.

Be here, now.

On My Mind

On Yoga and Writing

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Today I thought that maybe I write for the same reasons that I practice yoga. It’s a way of accessing another part of the brain, another part of the body. Perhaps, if you’ll allow me the liberty, another part of the soul.

I was introduced to yoga over ten years ago and have maintained a regular practice since the beginning. It has evolved over time, naturally, and I have written at length on this blog about my experiences with yoga. It tends to come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that I practice both yoga and meditation, light incense, look for the spiritual. By this I mean, yoga is a way of accessing, through the body and breath, a different outlook on the world. It is a way of reaching, physically, to parts of my body that I might not fully notice otherwise; it is a way of reaching, spiritually, towards both energy and stillness, towards forces in the universe I cannot explain.

Towards forces in the universe I don’t need to explain.

Maybe I write because writing is a way of expressing what lives in the body, the sensations of being alive on this planet and looking up at the sky. Writing is a way to capture the pulse of energy that sweeps you away when you let it it. Writing brings sensation back to a foundation, back to a centre where it can be grasped, felt, explored.

I write because I am feeling and I practice yoga in order to feel.

Sometimes, and certainly the case in much of my journal writing, I don’t understand what I feel until I write it down. Moving from sensation to articulation requires a conscious slowing down, letting go, a certain objectivity that reduces an emotional component, or at least requires me to detach from it just enough to inquire into it, unpack it. This is what I mean when I say, as I have known to be true for a long time, I think better on paper.

Yoga moves the sensation through the body and begins an exploration of how the body is connected, constructed, understood. I was first fascinated, all those years ago, with the shapes I could create with a breath. Perhaps years of dance training facilitated the ease with which I found my body in a new form, or perhaps innately understanding the possibility of movement in the body meant that I have always approached yoga with curiosity. Let’s see where I am in this body today. And then let go of the body and move with the breath.

Or maybe I’m trying too hard in linking these two aspects of myself together. I have had profound experiences in both contexts, that of doing yoga and that of writing. I do not aim here to explain what those experiences were or where they came from, but rather to make the bold claim that they existed. There are things in the universe we cannot explain, and the statement of such is what makes the claim true.

What is true, however, is malleable. There are days when the body and mind flow as a unit more smoothly than on other days. There are days where we walk easily, calmly, gently though the world. There are days when we are literally and figuratively bent out of shape, and we may or may not know why, or days when someone else knows something is wrong even before we know it.

I cannot write without being vulnerable enough to look inside myself and there is always the threat, sometimes realized, of finding something I don’t like. I cannot practice yoga without the willingness to sometimes feel a little foolish, or to be humbled by what my body is and is not capable of. There’s an element of letting go of control in both contexts and a requirement for honesty, authenticity, sincerity that strips away whatever masks I happen to be wearing. It’s a question of how much I am willing to give in that moment, and the question is answered moment after moment.

Maybe yoga is the physical manifestation of what I look for in writing, or maybe writing is the intellectual element of synchronizing the breath and the body. That they come together in this way is what drives the continued exploration. The satisfaction, the sensation of which lives somewhere beneath the sternum and is captured by clauses and phrases, is in the journey itself.

As for the universe, the magnificence of which is unexplained as far as I am concerned, there is no answer within reach because there is no answer to find.