Breath is a system of the body that is both automatic and controllable.  If you don’t think about it, you simply breathe.  And your breath reflects the state of your mind and your body.  Conversely, if you do think about it, you can change the patterns of your breath, and this will, in turn, affect your mind and body.

All of your experiences are reflected in the quality of your breath.  If you start to watch it, you’ll see this.  If you’re excited or afraid, your breath quickens.  If you’re straining, you might hold your breath.  If you’re very still and totally focused, you might notice the breath is very shallow.

The first step of being able to work with this most important body-mind bridge, is to bring awareness.  Notice your breath patterns.  Notice the volume of breath you use.  When do you take a big deep breath.  When do you hold your breath.

The next step is to do some conscious breathing:

Lay down on your back and start doing a three part breathe.  Many teachers show this breath starting in the lower abdomen, then the ribcage, then the upper lung.  I like to teach this breath the way yoga master, T.K.V. Desikachar teaches it, by starting with the ribcage, then into the lower lungs, then into the apex of the lungs.  His reasoning is that this allows the back to lengthen and expand, also, breathing into the bottom of the lungs first, compresses the internal organs, instead of allowing the diaphragm to expand.  He suggests trying it both ways to see which you prefer.

The area of the lungs that seems to be the hardest for people to access is the apex.  It is interesting to note that there is actual lung tissue above the collar bones.   The lungs are huge, and fill up most of the thoracic cavity.  Instead of forcing your breath into the apex of the lungs, see if you can relax a little bit deeper and allow the lungs to fill.  I envision it not so much like stuffing more laundry into an already full bag, but like tucking a tissue into a crack with a pin!

Once  you get the hang of filling your lungs completely, and just as important, emptying your lungs completely, you are ready to start doing your asana practice.

Once you move into movement with the breath, you are not going for the biggest breath ever, but rather a comfortable, steady breath.  If you notice your breath gripping, struggling, or gasping, you’re working physically too hard.  You need to slow down the physical movement, and bring more ease to the breath.

In yoga, you breathe in and out through the nose, in order to start to generate and contain energy in the core.  In Energy Medicine, you breathe in the nose and out the mouth, in order to release excess energy in the body and also to link the central and governing meridian channels which circle the core of the body.

Learning the connection between body and mind, and when the body/mind needs to build energy or release it, is part of the self-study of the EM Yoga practice.  Once you know what you need, and you have the tools to affect change, you are on your way to having a more powerful control over your life.

Yoga sutra 1.14 says: It is only when the correct practice is followed for a long time, without interruptions and with a quality of positive attitude and eagerness, that it can succeed.

Nothing succeeds without commitment.  So commit yourself to your practice.  Except on the first days of your moon cycle or during a serious injury or illness, practice every day.   Bring yourself to your mat and start to move.

Bring all of yourself to the mat.  The part of you that is lazy, or angry or tired.  The part that is bored or disbelieving or disenchanted.  Practice anyway.

When you are too busy, or when you’re bored, when your life is transcendent, and when it is falling apart.  Come to the mat.  Give yourself to the practice.

After a while, it will become a habit, like brushing your teeth, and you wonder how you ever could have done without it.  But it will not be a habit like brushing your teeth, it will be like learning a new language, or how to play an instrument, or learning to play ice hockey when you are already 35.  It will be a challenge, it will come slowly, it will trip you up and make you pause and look even deeper at your own behavior.  And little by little, it will reveal itself to you.  Your practice will show you who you are, and it will be improving you, in every moment.  Not making you hotter, or sexier, or slimmer but allowing you to recognize your own divinity.  Your own humanity.  You will increase your compassion for yourself, and thereby increase it for others.  You will feel yourself a part of the universe, and begin to see the interconnection of everything.  You will learn and discover things that I do not know, and can not write of here, because they will be your own secret mystery.   And your constant daily practice will also make you stronger, more flexible in body and mind, more resilient, calmer.

That is, after all, what life is.  A constant repetition of tasks.  There is never completion.  There are only more tasks, many of them, the exact same tasks you did yesterday.  Dishes, laundry, making the beds.  Cooking, eating, cleaning up from dinner.

If you learn to enjoy the tasks, and not the completion of the the tasks you can find happiness.  But you must practice this, because the natural tendency is to long of the end of the task.  To long for completion.

It is not called “Perfect” – it is called “Practice”.  It will teach you to find the joy and presence of every moment.  And at the very least, it will give you the deep satisfaction of a dedicated commitment.

Before you start your practice today, take a moment to still yourself, turn your attention inward, to your heart center.  Allow yourself to feel gratitude for something in your life.  It could be something small, like you just enjoyed a really good cup of tea that a friend made for you, or large, like you just got that big promotion.  Whatever it is, allow the feeling of gratitude to fill your heart and then expand outwards.

Next, bring to mind someone or something in your life that is in greater need than yourself.  It could be a sick or depressed friend, or the plight of refugees in a foreign country, or a polluted stream near your house.

Bring your hands to prayer position in front of your heart, and dedicate your practice to that person or thing that’s in great need.

As you do your practice, be mindful that you are not doing this for yourself.  As it is written in the Bhagavad Gita, do the work, but not for the fruits of your labors.  Do the work, and your practice, as part of your path, not for the desire for your own gain.

When you offer up your practice to someone or something else, you allow your own ego to diminish and your heart center to expand.  You begin to feel yourself connected to the larger world.  Your own needs and doubts and fears fade away in the face of a need greater than your own limited experience.

Weaving together the ancient traditions of Tantra Yoga and Energy Medicine to build a dynamic and healing home practice

Energy Medicine Yoga is a synthesis of many techniques I’ve studied over the years.  However there are two that are the most important and most influential on my own practice and teaching.

The first is Para Yoga.  I’ve been studying with Para Yoga founder Rod Stryker since 1999 and was initiated into the lineage in 2007.  This ancient, methodical, spiritual and scientific approach to yoga has been a wellspring of solace and power since I began studying.  The inclusion of deep meditation practices, visualization and articulate asana as well as devotion to prayer, mantra and guru – have allowed me to enter into a world of yoga previously unknown to me.  My initiation into the lineage further melted my attachment to ego, allowing me ever deeper access to the profound techniques of Para Yoga.  I bow down at the lotus feet of my teacher, and his teacher…

The second most profound synthesis of ideas I’ve discovered is Energy Medicine. Founded by Donna Eden, this deep and ancient practice is accessible to everyone.  In fact, the oldest medicine alive, EM continues to support and heal hundreds of thousands of people worldwide with its simple and powerful techniques.  Based on the truth, declared by Einstein that, “Energy is all there is,” – we begin to work with our own basic essential nature at its source, vibration and energy.  I am currently a teaching assistant for Donna and am enrolled in the three year certification program.

It is very powerful to have both of these teachers present in the synthesis practice of EM Yoga.  It is both the masculine and the feminine, the yin and the yang.  In order for us to become whole and healthy beings in this world, we have to balance these elements within ourselves too.  I find it particulalry interesting that until both of these teachers appeared in my life, I was not able to truly move forward with my own dharma.  Once again, the universe is at play, bringing powerful feminine and masculine energies together to teach us what is more than a sum of its parts.

I hope you will find the information provided on these pages to be useful and helpful as you develop your own practice.

It shouldn’t be surprising that John Friend abused his power in sexual ways.  If powerful men are going to abuse their power, they will almost always abuse it in sexual ways.  The fact that Friend lied, cheated and stole, going directly against three of the tenets of the Yamas, the yogic equivalent of the ten commandments, are further reasons why his entire Anusara community and the rest of the yoga world at large are left gasping in consternation.

Part of this consternation is an actual physiological effect.  A segment on NPR discussed the problem among voters with the inconsistency of politicians.  Pulling from a study from Dr. David Lindon, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins, we are told how the brain not only looks for consistency and predictability, but rewards us when we predict well.  Predict correctly, someone’s behavior or intention, and science reporter Jon Hamilton tells us, “you get a burst of pleasure inducing dopamine.  Get it wrong and dopamine levels dip.”  And it is much more serious when its something important.  Dr. Linden says, “When we feel deeply betrayed, either by a leader or by someone in our social circle or by our beloved, that pain really is similar to physical pain.”

Being betrayed by this spiritual teacher would cause all of his followers and many lovers, actual physical pain, and the subsequent recoil.  That is why dozens of his teachers are scrambling to distance themselves from him and reclaim their own autonomy.  But this also likely leads to more of the same bad behavior.

John Friend got trapped in the male power ego structure which made it harder for him to choose what to practice and what to flout in the vast science of Tantra.  In that trap, that he essentially set for himself, he had no help.  The problem for many of the powerful yoga men committing acts of gross sexual misconduct (including famed yogi and recent sex scandal veteran Rodney Yee) – is that they have no teacher.  In the yoga tradition, and especially in Tantra, it is of utmost importance to have a teacher.  As Tantric scholar David Frawley tells us,  “….some of the teachers who have become famous in the West as Tantric…have not themselves come from any real traditional background, and have been self-proclaimed gurus, without having had any real guru of their own.”

John Friend is one of these, and without a guru to guide him, fell victim to his own self-adulation, and the adulation of his students.  And now his students are falling into that same net-less gap.  Friend has studied a smorgasbord of yoga with many different teachers and styles, but is not part of a tradition.  He had the hubris to begin his own tradition, but without the stability of a history to guide him, or a specific guru to steer him straight when he veered steeply off the path of ‘right relationship,’ he was almost certain to fail.

Whether or not hatha yoga and Tantra in particular were historically ‘sex cults,’  as Broad asserts, the fact of the matter is that Tantra accesses spirituality through all possible means.  Tapping into sexual energy is simply the start and the lowest level of energy, residing in the root chakra at the base of the spine.  It is also the easiest energy for a new student to recognize, having many experiences with this energy prior to yoga.  The point of the yoga practice, a point obviously lost on Friend, is to raise that energy up through the 7 chakras to the crown, where you experience connection with the divine.

Again, from David Frawley, “Tantra emphasizes techniques or energetic approaches including ritual, mantra and visualization…Tantra has a universal approach that uses all available methods and rejects nothing…Tantra gives special place to the the Goddess and her worship.”

Of these three basic Tantric characteristics it is the third one that causes the most problems.  Either the Goddess is objectified and used as a sex object, or she is vilified, and denigrated as a shrew.  In our society, we have not yet learned to honor the true power of the feminine.  Most things feminine have been sublimated in our culture, the power reduced to pure titillation.  And in some instances, outright hostility.  One need only look to the current vilification of women trying to take charge of their own reproductive systems, to see that men have always had a hard time with women in power.  Rush Limbaugh’s attack on feminine sexuality could be directly viewed through the lens of his own fears of inadequacy as a man.  A real man does not need to objectify or subjugate women in order to feel empowered himself.

The problem here is not the ‘secret’ roots of yoga, but the fact that the sexual component was sublimated and forced to disappear in the first place.  Instead of yoga whitewashing the ‘sex’ out of it – like Christianity tried to do to similar horrible effect – we have the real opportunity to teach the true and honest power of sexuality. The body is designed to experience incredible physical pleasure.  Yoga teachers should teach that there is a time and place for those things and teach serious ethics and boundaries.   It clearly isn’t enough to have a set of guidelines for yoga teachers and practitioners.  This needs to be a part of the curriculum of yoga itself.

Sex is a powerful tool, and it has been co-opted by the advertising and movie industry to the disempowerment of everyone else.  It is the most powerful drive on earth, after hunger, and if students of yoga were taught about their own inherent sexual power, they would not be at the whim of every prayerful man, or guru, drifting about.

This week in my open yoga class, we use this latest scandal as a teachable moment.  Always in class, I teach them how to use their bodies, minds and spirits in respectful ways, but tonight, we talk about sex.

I teach to a predominantly male population at a military university.  My students are 18, 19, 20 years old, newly on their own, testing all the boundaries and limits.  Although the campus is technically ‘dry,’ there still seem to be many opportunities to drink.  And with the ratio of men to women at 70%-30%, the incidence of sexual abuse on campus is quite high.  The military at large also has a long history of hidden sexual abuse, and now these men and women, who will be the next leaders in the military and in positions of power, are trying to learn emotional intelligence.

When I talk about this yoga sex scandal at the start of class all my students gasp and giggle.  “Really?”  they ask, almost in unison.  “Sex scandals.  And drugs?  Yogis?”

We start right in on the most powerful force in the world, the sex drive.  I teach them Moola Bhanda, the root lock at the base of the spine.  This is activated by tightening the perineum and is very similar to a sexual feeling.

“We’ll have better sex!” one boy shouts out in an answer to my question of why practice yoga.  Everyone hoots with laughter.  And I tell him the truth.  I tell him, “Yes, you can absolutely improve your sexual performance.  But if you really learn the power of this energy, and start to lift it up the spine from Moola Bhanda, you will improve your performance in ever single venue of your life.  Your creativity, your power in the world, your ability to love and be loved, to speak your truth, to see the truth, and to commune with God.  There it is, the ladder to the divine.”  So many people get caught up in that first delicious, gooey, first chakra.  But it is a dangerous place to stop your spiritual path.

Part of yoga is learning boundaries and correct understanding of situations.  One of the ways to do this is called svadyaya, self study.  The student is encouraged to watch their thoughts and see how they feel in any given moment.  They start to create a ‘witness’ self and then to develop their higher powers of intuition.  From this place, they learn to understand right from wrong.

As these young students learn to respect themselves more, they learn to respect others more.  It is interesting that in the military, not known for its gentleness of spirit, these men are trying, in earnest, to incorporate the yogic tenets of non-violence, truthfulness and contentment.  While in the world of yoga, the men are breaking all the rules and preying on the most vulnerable members of their flocks.

We have for too long in our society denied and suppressed the power of sexuality,  using it as a titillation instead of the positive, creative force it is.  Yoga has the opportunity to take it back and teach sexuality in a healthy and meaningful way.   And then perhaps these men in power will have a safe place to go to learn what they are so clearly unable to teach.

Been reading some of Hemingway’s letters in this month’s Vanity Fair.  He is one of my favorite writers, and one who deeply influenced me.

I remember reading the Nick Adams stories and longing for a life in the wild.  I remember Nick’s sandwiches, onion and butter wrapped in wax paper in his pocket, waiting to be eaten by the side of a stream.  And nothing seemed as delicious to me as that.

Looking back I see how much of my life I modeled on this writer, who became a favorite of mine because he was my father’s favorite.  Just like I adopted Black Raspberry ice cream, because my father loved it.

In my life I’ve learned to hunt and hike and camp.  To sit quietly by a river.  To love deeply and to think it simple, while knowing truly how complex it is.  I’ve learned to love the short, declarative sentence, and to love the word ‘and.’  To love the repetitive, poetic telling of a story in lines that are bold and clean, and which, together, add up to a nuanced and detailed interior space.

I’ve loved Papa’s courage.  Both Hemingway’s and my father’s.  I’ve loved his boldness and his passion.  And his simple egoic desire for revenge, which he took out in his fiction on those who dismayed him in his life.

I don’t love Papa’s early death.  Not Hemingway’s, nor my father’s.  I don’t like missing what stories might have been.  What memories left unmade.  What aisles gone unwalked.

But since, as Einstein said, time is not a line, but a point, truly, there is no missing unless the missing is a joy to feel, a longing in the heart, a yearning toward, like a flower leaning upward to the sun.  Missing, like sadness, like grief, is just another way to feel alive.  Like loving.  Like playing madly in the woods on wooden skies in deepest snow.  I took that too from Hemingway.  My love of winter, and the winter woods.  My love of Spanish and unrequited love.  My love of life itself – lived brashly, fully, exultantly.

From the privacy of your own living room or the seclusion of your office, you sit with your computer, glowing its eery blue light.  There is no end to the things you can find on the internet.  Hundreds of sites where people have the same exact strange and quirky opinion as you.  Thousands of sites where people express opinions abhorrent to you, absolutely antithetical to everything you think and believe in.

These people must be crazy, those ones who think differently, live differently, behave differently.  Surely they are insane.  Certifiable.  Even lock-up-able.  What can you do?  Their opinion, which certainly can’t be true, is exactly opposite of your opinion.  This.  Means.  War.

But you have some ammunition.  You have the power of words too.   You know that whole pen mightier than…blah blah..  And you are burning up mad!  Never mind that Chekov said to come to the page cold as ice.  To hell with Chekov.  You’ve got a beef to grind!

So you let fly with everything you’ve got.  Every mean, angry, nasty thought you can think.  Every rejoinder, cruel, and of course true, idea comes pouring out.  You reread it.  Wow.  Who knew you had such power in you.  You could slay a roomful of dragons with this stuff.  You feel a bit afraid yourself.  Hmmm.  How should you sign it?   You look around the room.  No one’s there but the cat, and he won’t tell.  You make up a fake name, put on a picture of a dragon.  And hit send.  Your talent at criticism unleashed on the world!

……

We have lost to the anonymity of the internet, our basic decency.  No more are we a society which debates ideas with honor, respect and integrity.  We are a culture spitting at each other from behind closed doors.  We have lost our ability to disagree kindly.   And with that, our capacity to expand our understanding beyond the limited scope of our own experiences.  It is easy to hate someone who is so different from yourself.  And easier still to abuse them from the distance and hiding inherent on the internet.  Our public discourse has suffered greatly.  And with that, our own private lives.  The enriched view we get from adopting another perspective.  It is time to become wary of our own dogmatic opinions.

I am reminded of a bumper sticker I saw years ago, in Seattle.

“If you can’t change your mind, are you sure you still have one.”

It starts out small, with a few angry words thrown at some random article posted online.  And it escalates to the complete breakdown of society.  On the edge of which, we are already teetering.