Yoga Debrief

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Involuntary GULPS in Savasana

Today I had a top ten yoga class with Peggy, from Iyengar Yoga Detroit. This "yoga nun" challenged me, I sweated, we tried some new stuff, fine tuned some old stuff and laughed out loud. It was great. So when it was time for Savasana, I knew something golden was going on.

For the past several month I have noticed that I am forced to swallow in Savasana. The thing with Corpse Pose is stillness, complete and utter stillness in mind and body. That's what makes it the hardest pose in the yoga dicipline. Chitta vrtti nirodhah - cessation of movements in the consciousness; this is Yoga Sutra 1.2. The practice of stilling the body makes it easier to still the consciousness. This is one way to describe meditation. But it is not stillness if my esophagus convulses.

The first time it happened I thought, "I'm swollowing my spit, I don't want to choke on saliva," and that very well may be the case. The throat is a part of the digestive system. But I think something else is going on too, and I think it is tied to fear.

In the cartoons, when you see Goofy going into a blubberingly brave situation, he takes a huge gulp to collect his courage. This is an act of swallowing down his fear. Peggy taught me today that the throat muscle group is an area of action. It is also the part of the physiognomy which houses the fifth chakra, the Visuddha Chakra. Among the Visuddha chakra's many correlations, speaking and storytelling are functions of it, which makes laymen sense when you think about where your voicebox is. I, personally, have crippling fears when it comes to finding and using my voice.

Lying in Savasana today, feeling strong and confident, I noticed that gulp coming on. I chose stillness instead. I reassured myself that my breath had a path into my lungs and out again, so I was safe. Through fighting the instinct to swallow, I began to feel sensation moving upward. Energetically, something was going on. There was energy moving through blockages in my tongue and throat. I could feel both the "energy" and the "blockages" distinctly. The energy was slow, flowing like blue mercury, with thin swirls of red, yellow, and orange. It progressed in the most minuscule amounts, no more than a tablespoon at a time spread out as thin as paper. Every so often a star-grain of electric energy would pop through with the liquid, then it would all float to my head as if it evaporated. The blockages were rock-like, but malleable, like dried clay that was slowly being wetted.

I felt fear. I also felt that the more I fought the instinct to react to fear, the energy would become more powerful and healing. The longer I fought off the reactive impulse, the greater the energy would grow. I felt increasingly blissful. Not full on bliss, mind you, but I was moving in that direction. I wonder what I would have felt if I had had more time to lie there, practicing.

Eventually I did have to swallow. Some things you body just does. It takes a long time and a lot of disciplined practice to learn control over your subtle internal functions. But I am learning! Aren't we all?

Yoga Journal and Me

I sat down with the August edition of Yoga Journal, and felt conflicted. Do I like this "People Magazine" of the yoga world, or is it superficial sell-out yoga stuff? Reading through the first half, I weighed the costs and benefits of the collection in print. The magazine spends time selling me consumer shit I don't need, while at the same time it opens socially conscious niche businesses to a wider market. I find myself involuntarily annoyed when every Yoga teacher puts a stamp on their brand of yoga and markets it as original, and even more provoked when that brander poses for the cover-story, but I also respect the ingenuity it takes to make a career in this much needed, underpaid field. As with every women's magazine, there is a section on food complete with a collection of recipes, and I enjoy the simple, healthful approach Yoga Journal takes (I will tell you how I really feel when I attempt one of its recipes). Some pages inspire me, other pages make me reel. Is this magazine a cheap commercial exploitation or a community building publication?

So halfway through the magazine I was still on the fence. Then I read the article which sealed my critique, and killed my cynicism: "Self Adjust" by Paula Derrow. She wrote from her own experience, not from her ego. Her article was not rooted in a self-serving desire to teach, or as an attempt to make a name for herself in the yoga world. It was her story as a personal reflection, and I was reminded of how powerful that can be. I lost myself in her words as she described her fall from the high-rise New York heights of publishing, to the humble backwoods cottage she was forced to retreat to. Her comparison of the competitive, pressurized, revolving door yoga classes in New York City to the unglamorous, DIY, "real yoga class" of her New England farming community reassured Midwestern me.

Yoga isn't about being competitive, or about comparison, and it especially isn't about judgement. My sneerings at Yoga Journal are all about my ego. These misanthropic musings tell me more about myself than about anything in the magazine. Anais Nin said, "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." Am I envious of the cover model who is making it as a yoga teacher? If we examine our reactions to the worldly stimulus we encounter, that which we recognize can act as signposts on our path to self-awareness. When we are self-aware, we can learn to discard the bad and cultivate the good.

There is this rift in the yoga community between so-called trendy yogis and true seekers, but we don't have to be divided that way. Fake it til you make it can work just as well in yoga as in anything; the benefits will be real no matter the approach. Each of us can be a teacher just as each of us is a student. Even the annoying ones teach you about patience! Sharing our experiences can only help us grow, as we each bring our individual egos, perceptions, and reactions to a common medium. So Thank You Yoga Journal, for putting it out there!