The Twelve Days of Christmas -- Day 12

January 6   

On the twelfth day of Christmas,

my true love gave to me

twelve drummers drumming

The twelve points of the Apostles’ Creed. Absolutely fitting, as we come to the finish line of our twelve-day sprint through theology, philosophy, and recovery. The Church fathers (doubtless while the Church mothers were tending the kids and the shop) itemized the Creed in 12 bullet points so that said kids and anyone new to the faith could remember them. Don’t think I want to list them here, but basically the Creed declares Jesus to be the Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary, and our rescuer and our protector.

This might be a good time to mention Step Eleven, which I forgot to bring up yesterday. It’s my favorite step, because it links recovery’s essentially dualist theology (God’s up there, you’re down here; God’s perfect, you’re far from it;

God can save you, you can’t save yourself) with one of nondualist Tantra’s main tenets: the Divine is always there/here, we just need to remember/recognize Him/Her/It:

Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

In other words, the sun is always shining, just open the blinds!

Step Twelve follows up by asking us to carry the message to others and be a power of example in our own lives. Gandhi would feel right at home. Think your little words and deeds don’t matter? Remember that diminutive man who rocked a continent and an Empire.

As for drumming, turn to Shiva Nataraj (see Day 9), Godas frenzied dancer. In his upper right hand he holds a drum, whose beat brings the world into being. A grown-up, Hindu, slightly deranged version of the Little Drummer Boy. Drums may be the one instrument that figures in every musical tradition worldwide. We all follow the upbeat, the downbeat, the beat of our own drums, our heartbeats.

As we close in on the Epiphany-the arrival of the three wise men at the manger-it’s time to step back from the story and ask:

How Awake am I?

What is my source, my light, my truth?

Which unwavering star guides me through the darkness?

How long and how far am I willing to travel?

You are every character in the story: the Virgin Mary, the humble wise men whose wisdom pales in the light of Christ’s simple insights, the baby Jesus, and God the Father. Even the Holy Spirit, if that counts as a “character.” You are Judas and the faithful apostles, Pontius Pilate and the Jews who became Christians and those who stayed their course. 

You are capable of great things and small, of awesome destructiveness and astounding creativity, of selfishness and generosity, of abysmal darkness and blinding light. The rest of your life has yet to be written. Let’s enter this new year and this new age where we began twelve days ago, with our sights on the Highest!

 

Hallelujah! 

Mazel tov!

Namaste!

Jai!

and

Amen.

The Twelve Days of Christmas --Day 11

 

January 5   

On the eleventh day of Christmas,

my true love gave to me

eleven pipers piping

Well, if you can make “eleventh” fit the beat when you sing this out loud, you’ve got one over me. Eleven is an awkward, a prime number, and outlier, so I guess it’s no surprise that it also claims an extra syllable and muddles the rhythm.

The pipers are the eleven faithful Apostles, meaning the whole
gang ‘cept Judas Iskariot, best known for going down in infamy. 

 

Question: How many can you name? Thought about Bartholomew or Thaddaeus lately? Thank God (or Jesus, or Allah, or Shiva) for Google, or I’d be well adrift on the seas of religious ignorance by now. So don’t be fooled, I’m looking this stuff up as I call it, having been raised in a household where the closest I ever got to church was an hour of silent Meeting at my Quaker school. For those of you who don’t know, Quakers eschewed the Bible and all scriptures, believing that God speaks directly to each of us. What a concept.

Anyway I just can’t find myself getting excited about eleven of anything. Didn’t even enjoy being eleven and was glad when it was over.

As for pipers, we’ve got Orpheus,whose tunes tamed the wildest animals. We’ve got Krishna, who my friend Julie tells me is kind of a Hindu Christ, yet 

whose best known for seducing the gopis (see Day 8), and closer to home

 we’ve got the Pied Piper, who led little children astray (or at least beyond the ken of their parents). Hell (oops!), let’s throw in Huck Finn and his harmonica, Bob Dylan as an Angry Young Man sucking the life out of his, windpipes and bagpipes and steampipes
and tobacco pipes, the longwinded and the full of hot air (my maternal grandfather being both, a dedicated pipe smoker and a windbag who loved to tug hard on my nose and call me Shnoogie).

 

The Twelve Days of Christmas -- Day 10

January 4   

On the tenth day of Christmas,

my true love gave to me

ten lords a-leaping

The Ten are of course the Ten Commandments, the time-tested list of no-no’s held to be sacred to human society and human survival.

 Must be something about ten that instills conscience. Step Ten asks us to continuing taking a daily moral inventory of ourselves and when we are wrong to promptly admit it. In other words, don’t let stuff pile up or you’re doomed to relapse. Yoga has the ten yamas and niyamas, which similarly instruct us not to lie, cheat or steal, to remain pure (indeed, chaste), to study, and to surrender to the Highest.

T’would seem that all tens lead to Rome, or Jerusalem, or the ashram, or rehab.

But amid all this seriousness, the lords are leaping. Leaps of faith? Perhaps, but I’m not convinced. Maybe they’re in

cahoots with the Irish jiggers (see Day 8).

I’ll segue here over to the Hindu myth of Hanuman (halfmonkey/half human in form, Divine in nature), who boldly leaps over the Ocean of Consciousness to reunite heartbroken Ram with his abducted wife Sita. Yogis the world round know Hanuman’s leap as the source, cause, and origin of one of the most feared asana: Hanumanasana, or the splits.

Yoga also says that ten forms of prana animate our being. The life force takes some interesting forms: moving up, moving down, moving all around, and causing such unconscious spasms as blinking and sneezing.

Tens in the vernacular have a pretty good rap: we’ve got

Perfect Ten

Base Ten

Ten to One

Tennis anyone?

The Twelve Days of Christmas -- Day 9

January 3  

On the ninth day of Christmas,

my true love gave to me

nine ladies dancing

Well, this is odd since dancing is practically anathema in the Christian Church. Did you know that the Irish peasants created the Irish jig (all legs, no arm movements) so they could dance indoors without being busted by their loving clergy? If a priest should walk by one of their houses and peer in the window, all he would see was the stationary upper body, not the prancing feet!

 

So let’s skip right over the continents to India, where dancing has long held its place among spiritual practices. Think of Sufism’s whirling dervishes. Think of the gopis (cow girls) who romped around hottie Krishna, hoping to entice him with sexual favors. Or Shiva Nataraj, the Lord in the form of the ecstatic dancer whose gyrations bring the world into being.

The yoga tradition also loves nines, and a set of nine nines (total of 108) is particularly auspicious. It’s also the numbermala beads that make up the Indian rosary. Nine is three squared, so sets of three also tend to pile up into nines, like the crescending sets of nine waves surfers count. Cats have nine lives (probably because they sleep through 80% of each life). The carrot dangled in from of you for completing the Ninth Step in recovery (where you make amends to all those you have harmed) is the “Promises,” which include gems like:

We will not regret the past or wish to shut the door on it.

Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us.

Feelings of uselessness and self-pity will disappear.

We will intuitively know how to handle situations that used to baffle us

Worthy rewards for anyone who’s willing to clean up his or her side of the street.

The Twelve Days of Christmas -- Day 8

January 2  

On the eighth day of Christmas,

my true love gave to me

eight maids a-milking

The eight beatitudes, given to us in the Gospel of St. Matthew as gifts from Jesus Christ. In contrast to the external (and negatives) of the Ten Commandments (“thou shalt not . . .”) these eight are gentler and generally more upbeat (at least if you find yourself at the bottom of the social totem pole). A little rusty on your Gospels? No worries, here they are verbatim:

"Blessed are the poor in spirit,

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they who mourn,

for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek,

for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst

for righteousness,

for they shall be satisfied.

Blessed are the merciful,

for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure of heart,

for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers,

for they shall be called children of God.

Blessed are they who are persecuted

for the sake of righteousness,

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

  -- Gospel of St. Matthew 5:3-10

Makes you feel good just reading it!

 

But back to the maids a milking. Tell me that’s not a pagan symbol of fecundity. Those ripe young lasses, that white milk a flowing, those motherly cows nourishing all those pink-faced little Christian cherubs . . .

But I also like that they’re having to work it! Milk and honey are not flowing without human exertion. We are no doubt grounded here on earth where such miracles are few and far between, so best to get down to it.

India reveres the cow as a sacred beast, and to this day cowsare treated better than most humans in that great land. Thus, if you have a peak at the classical yogic diet, you’ll see it’s heavy on dairy: milk, yogurt, ghee, paneer. Alas, our American cows do not get such gentle handling, and the dairy consortium calcium scam notwithstanding (turns out the calcium we need for our bones can’t be absorbed through dairy products), vegan is always an option. Might nose you a step or two closer to the beatitudes.

Other memorable 8s:

  • The 8 Noble Truths of Buddhism

  • “8 Days a Week,” by the Beatles

  • figure 8 (infinity sign)

  • The 8 ball

The Twelve Days of Christmas -- Day 7

January 1   On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me seven swans a-swimming New Year's Day meant diddlysquat to the early Christians, but in the modern calendar it does mark the halfway point in the 12 Days. I for one am happy to know that I have only five more days of wisdom to impart, and if you are still reading this you maybe you will see me through to the grand Epiphany. The seven swans are the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit. What are these, you ask? Wisdom (according to Thomas Aquinas linked to the virtue of Charity). Understanding: linked to Faith Counsel (Right Judgment): linked to Prudence Courage: linked to Fortitude Knowledge: linked to Hope Piety: linked to Justice Fear of the Lord: linked to Temperance Seven throughout the Biblical traditions is associated with fullness, completion, and perfection. But we are not yet done here! And far from perfect at that! Step Seven asks God to remove our shortcomings. Let's dovetail things here and ask him to replace all that garbage with the Seven Gifts. Then we won't have to go through the Steps ever again, much less climb back on the wheel of karma for another go-round. Mainstream yoga maps the body as a string of seven chakrasor energy vortexes that spin on the axis of the shushumna nadi (spinal column in the physical body)-though some traditions winnow it down to five, and still others balloon out to twelve. The chakras don't line up with the Seven Gifts, though, so don't go wandering down that path. Instead, they govern all aspects of what makes you you, from your basic urge to survive to your loftiest spiritual insights. You need 'em all, and you want them all running smoothly. For a stellar description of how that all works and why it runs amok and what to do when it does, see Anodea Judith's Wheels of Life and/or her Eastern Body,Western Mind. I can't let a reference to swimming flow by without reminding you that "anu-sara" (as in Anusara yoga) means both "with the essence" and "with the flow." We practice to align with the currents of Grace. A swimmer who steps into a strong current and swims against it will drown. A swimmer who steps into a strong current and does nothing drowns. A swimmer to swims with the current gets to the other side. How about it? Are you still playing salmon forging up the stream of life? Are you a lounge lizard wondering when Grace will descend upon you? Or are you willing to co-create, to build upon the gifts you have already received (including the gift of life) and make something more?   Anusara yoga has seven loops that help us to stand tall. In doing so, they reconnect the front to the back of the body, the little self that moves through the world to the collective that supports it/you/me. We Americans are a forward-looking people, leaning into our bright futures with as much drive as we run from our own pasts. What if there were somethings of true value in what you had already done/learned/felt/seen and heard? Our bodies are tangible evidence of where we have been and what we've done, for better or for worse. Anusara Yoga is your roadmap back to your inborn health and harmony. Come back to the mat! Okay, that's nine paragraphs on the seven swans, so time to cut this short! PS: This is the last of the birds.

The Twelve Days of Christmas -- Day 6

December 31   On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me six geese a-laying The six days of creation before God rested on the Sabbath. Eggs are of course a well-worn flag of new beginnings, featuring prominently in Easter and other pagan-inspired spring rites of renewal. Cherished and adorned by Tsarist Russia, dismissed for possessing more than a reasonable share of cholesterol, the humble egg is still my favorite lunch-on-the-go (hardboiled and eaten out of the shell at room temp, in the style of those wire trees perched on the counters old French cafes). Raising chickens is newly hip, and I've had the pleasure of watching my brother's flock drop their daily quota. The beauty lies in the diversity: some are pale green and oblong, others peach and round. Each day a new gift. Each perfect in its own way. The yoga tradition pictures the universe as a cracked egg, its perfect beauty marred by a fissure that in turn allows the universe to grow and to evolve. Awakening ones trace their way along the seam, for it is through the cracks that the light of the Divine also shines. Baby chicks must tap tap tap their way out of the hard shell protecting them. We too must continually push out against the boundaries we set for ourselves, caterpillars breaking through the chrysalis. To do so means leaving our old selves behind. Step Six announces that we are willing to have God remove all the defects of character that emerged in our moral inventory (see Day Four). Yoga is the power of transformation, and God knows we could all do with change. The Hindu pantheon features sets of three gods and three goddesses (total: six) who encompass the cycle of creation-sustenance-dissolution: Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva    Saraswati-Laksmi-Kali (Though later Tantra switches the order of the goddesses, seeing Kali as the innate potential that spurs creation.) The ghostly trio of the Three Fates provide a vastly underrated backdrop to the Greek myths: no matter what antics the gods and goddesses may enact, the final outcome always lies in the hands of the three ladies: one who spins the thread of life one who doles it out one who cuts it short. Who's pulling on your string? How are you making use of what's being doled out? A fond farewell to 2011!

WHATS WITH THE INJURY?

Yoga is widely touted, historically and today, as a miraculous holistic path to physical, energetic, mental, emotional, and spiritual health.  The scriptures are full of extravagant promises: illnesses and aging will disappear, we can live forever! And they don’t stop there. We can cultivate paranormal powers like inflating to the size of the universe, shrinking to the size of an atom, being in two places at once, seeing into the future.

If yoga is so good for us,  why are so many getting injured? And how?

How  is the easy part.  As a “science” in the Western sense, yoga is in its infancy. Ayurveda, the Indian traditional medicine, did not begin its study of the body by cutting it open. Dissections are a Western inspiration. Instead, Indian doctors explored the body experientially, learning what they could from visible markers like complexion and build and more subtle indicators like the pulse one can feel by pressing on someone’s wrist. The yogis of the past looked for similar signs, only on an even higher degree of subtlety. They explored with they experienced as internal energy flows, which they categorized as 10 forms of prana or the life force. These included upward flows and downward flows but also pranas devoted exclusively to sneezing, burping, and other spasmodic eruptions. The yoga postures we know began as attempts to direct, redirect, and channel energy—not as a spiritual form of physical fitness.

Thus, the yogis did not know about muscles and bones, the central nervous system, the cerebellum. Yogic “anatomy” instead mapped out 72,000 nadis (energy pathways similar to the Chinese meridians), chakras (spinning wheels located along the central nadi that govern everything from posture to personality), the pranas, and three bandhas (locks that direct or stem the flow of prana). It was only in the late 20th century, thanks to the singular, tireless, and exacting empirical research of Indian teacher B.K.S. Iyengar, that we came to view yoga asana from the perspective of Western structural well being. Iyengar, though trained by master Indian yogi Krishnamacharya, also served at one point in his youth as a medical model. He stood on stage in only a loincloth while a medical professor pointed out bones and muscles and their actions to his students. Iyengar picked up this knowledge and applied it to asanas, especially to the frustrations and limitations that many of his students were encountering in trying to fold in half, touch their toes, open their chests, or stand on their heads and hands. He created props (see “Props: Who Needs Them?”) like blocks and straps and blankets that would allow students to do modified forms of the poses safely and effectively while moving toward the happy day when their hips, shoulders, hamstrings, pecs, and hip flexors would open or their hands, arms, and upper back would grow strong.

Sadly, much of the yoga practiced today remains ignorant of Iyengar’s breakthroughs, or perhaps sees them as irrelevant. After all, the postures were initially created to facilitate the flow of prana, not to stack bones, and many yoga systems continue to see breath, not alignment, as the essence of yoga. The breath traditions view alignment as secondary at best, at worst as a mental preoccupation that distracts students from deep breathing. Even old photos of Iyengar doing asanas with wildly hyperextending joints and other anatomical distortions seem to contradict the very alignment instructions he gives students!

So, many of us continue to practice perilously ignorant of both the physical benefits and the risks of asanas. As in most fields, it’s how rather than what you do that matters. The same pose in optimal alignment can build strength, lengthen muscles, and improve balance—or feed old unconscious patterns that continue to weaken and destabilize the whole.

And even if we receive good instruction, applying the science of yoga is an art that can take a lifetime to refine.  Indeed, the yogic texts of the past frequently admonish us not to practice without the guidance of a skilled teacher. Don’t try this at home! And the more subtle the practice, the greater the danger: pranayama, or breathwork is especially dangerous. Yoga teacher trainings often reinforce these fears. I have heard more than one story of some poor soul who had a psychotic break while experimenting too freely with the various breathing practices and never made it back from the ashram. Even applying physical alignment principles to our own bodies is tricky business; we think we have it right, yet it’s damn hard to know, as none of us can see ourselves clearly. I’ve injured myself more than once playing the role of self-teacher. A teacher or fellow yogi can often steer us clear of imbalances, torques, dropped shoulders, collapsed waistlines, protruding thighbones, and other distortions.

Balancing Act

Black/white. Hot/cold. In/out. On/off. We live in a bipolar world, much of it our own creation (though Nature herself has been known to pull some pretty extreme moves). At the most basic level, our technology from Morse code to computer programs encrypts the universe as dot/dash, zero/one.

 We seem drawn to extremes, happy to swing from the end of the pendulum like monkeys from trees, passing through the middle ground with time for no more than a backward glance.

I don’t know why this is so.  It does make the world a simpler place to live: if we can divide people, as a grad-school friend of mine did, into angels and devils, it’s easy to choose sides. If we are blue or red, we always know how to vote—we don’t have to ponder, to reconsider, to examine the many shades of purple. We know who is right and who is wrong.

But extremes also cause great suffering. Ask anybody who lives in the desert, where days are scorching hot and nights frigid. Watch a small child: giddy with joy one moment, wailing as though her whole small world were crashing down around her in the next. Remember what it feels like when you have a fever, the strenuous oscillation between overheated and chilled. Look what climate change has wrought:  a world of dramatic tsunamis and earthquakes and floods, as our planet tries desperately to regain equilibrium.

And yet we persist—overworking, then collapsing; overeating, then fasting; frenetically socializing, then hiding out. Exhausting beyond all reason. And of course, we bring this same imbalance into our yoga. Many of us dip our toes into practice, then dive in, get hooked, get fanatical about a class/teacher/practice, and either injure ourselves or suck the joy out of it all with our sheer intensity. We practice when we are sick, tired, jetlagged or just plain old distracted. We push our bodies to do things they were not yet meant to do. We self-combust, we burn out. And then we lapse out.

Despite appearances, yoga is not about extremes—at least not the “householder” yoga practiced by those of us with kids, jobs, mortgages and other paraphernalia of earthly existence. The austerities of renunciate life (celibacy, restrictive diet, rigorous cleansing practices, standing all day on one foot or with one arm raised, onerous rituals) are reserved for swamis (monks or nuns) who devote their entire existence to the path.

Yoga for ordinary humans should restore us to balance, not throw us further off course. Anusara Yoga’s Universal Principles of Alignment make this possible throughout our material and energetic body-fields. Each principle has a counter-principle or complement: rolling the upper inner thighs in, back, and apart paired with scooping the tailbone; “puffing the kidneys” (filling out the back waist) with drawing the shoulder blades more onto the back to open the chest; drawing legs and arms into sockets while also extending back out.

The canon of postures also returns us to center. Backbends counteract our tendency to stoop and round forward, while forward bends stretch tight hamstrings and buttocks and relieve compression in the lower back.  Twisting right and left ensures that we don’t indulge our personal inner-body rotations (tendency to turn one way and not the other). Inversions flip us upside-down, taking a load off our legs and feet and challenging our arms and upper back to join the game.

Yoga, essentially a solitary and inward-turning endeavor, also counteracts our overextended, extroverted, chronically plugged-in lifestyle. Disconnected from Ibook/pod/pad, from Facebook and Twitter and Googleplus, we confront ourselves. I often tell my students that they can learn everything they need to know about themselves within the confines of their sticky mats. Cheaper if not easier than therapy, this self-scrutiny separates us from the onslaught of images and opinions coming at us from outside and invites us to explore those that arise from within. (Take note: if you are new, or even newish, to practice, it’s going to take awhile for the true inner voices to be heard beneath the hubbub of recorded messages you’ve been absorbing from outside throughout your life. Twenty years into my practice, I’m still struggling to distinguish the two.)

And how much practice is “balanced” for any one person? I reached a point with my Ashtanga practice where I had bent my whole life around practice, going to bed at 9:00 so I could awaken predawn, plough through a two-and-a-half-hour practice that left me limp as a noodle by mid-afternoon. I lost touch with friends who kept more “normal” New York schedules. I practiced so hard I probably created more tension than I dispelled.  On the other hand, too many hours/days away from my mat and, well, suffice it to say I’m not good company! Edgy, contracted, rigid, disconsolate are just a few of the adjectives that come to mind. These days I try to get some yoga in every day, but “some” can mean 15 minutes or four hours. I’m no longer rigid about when and where. I’ve come to trust my inner gauge of when I’m level, on beam, and when I’m off. And this balancing act has translated into my life off the mat. I’ve found happiness (yes!) in the middle ground. Come join me—there’s plenty of space! It’s only at the edges where things get crowded.