Intellectualizing the Body

Yoga, as practiced in the West, is a physical practice. I have expressed before my difficulties coming to terms with this vision of yoga. After all, yoga in its origins is so much more than a physical practice. The very beginning of the Yoga Sutras tells us that Yoga is a calming of the mind. Less than five of the yoga sutras are dedicated to the physical asana practice.

And yet over and over again I am reminded that one of the greatest benefits of yoga is the physical practice. As the first of the koshas, the physical body is the entry into our deeper selves. It is through our bodies that we enter our souls. As we learn to understand our bodies, our vehicles for this Earth, we understand our deeper being-ness. But in order for it to be that entryway, we must actually feel it. We must experience it.

That’s the tough part!

If it is not abundantly obvious from the fact that I decided to go for an additional year of law school to get my master’s degree and from the fact that I write a blog about yoga (which is arguably not necessarily doing yoga), I love learning and thinking. The very first time I ever went to see a non-western doctor (healer, energy worker, pick a term), he informed me that I live about 97% in my head and about 3% in my body. I have no idea where he got those numbers, and I have not seen him in over 8 years, but his statement stuck with me.

I over think everything. Rather than truly experience, I want to understand with my mind.

As humans, there are a few things that set us apart. Our prefrontal cortex is on that list. It is, after all, that which takes us out of our reptilian instincts and provides us with rational thought. We honor great thinkers, and the greatest number of likes on the Is Yoga Legal facebook page always come from interesting and insightful quotes. The shorter the better, of course. We like to think, but facebook is not the place for deep thoughts, apparently.  

More than just thinking, in the modern world, we actually try to not feel. We take pills when we feel pain. We take pills when we feel sad. We drink caffeine and alcohol “to get through the day.” When we suppress these experiences, they need to become more and more pronounced until we are finally forced to pay attention. A small headache becomes chronic tension headaches. A cold becomes pneumonia. As our bodies try to get us to slow down, and we ignore them, they finally force us to stop completely.

That issue is well documented. Even western doctors are finally discussing the problems associated with chronic stress and ignoring early warning signs. But there is another issue. And this one may be harder to grasp.

Our minds are not the only way we can understand. Our bodies create a different type of understanding when we are willing to truly experience. For example, in yoga teacher training, and in many of the classes I currently attend, I have learned about the inner spiral of the thighs. This helps protect the pelvis and stabilize the lower body. On an intellectual level, I get it. I can tell when participants in my class are doing it. But guess what? I have not been doing it appropriately. The same is true of a variety of minute details of postures. I can intellectually know I am not doing something, but until my body feels what it means to do it, I do not fully understand.

And therein lies the problem of trying to understand a yoga posture, of trying to make meaning out of pain. Sometimes, what we must do is simply experience. The experience has something to teach us. The body has something it wants to show us. We may never understand it on an intellectual level, but if we learn to fully experience it, the body will show us what we need.

Thus, the asana experience, although a small portion of the yoga sutras, has something unique to teach us. In its own way, it is about quieting the mind. While certainly there are moments where we cannot focus on the mind when we are so focused on the body, what the asana practice is finally beginning to teach me is that the mind is not the only understanding. Getting out of the mind and into the body is not just a way to de-stress; it is also a way to understand who we are. And perhaps that is the greatest wisdom.

What have you learned from your physical yoga practice? Are there even words to describe it?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2012, all rights reserved.

The Body as Teacher

I have mentioned before that I went into yoga teacher training hoping to go deeper into yoga teachings. I used to scoff, somewhat, at the role asana plays in yoga. Sure, I thought, postures are important, but the real yoga is meditation and the changes it brings to our spirits, not our bodies.

But yoga teacher training changed all that. Not only did I learn about the koshas, and how yogis have always described how our bodies are one pathway to learning about the deeper aspects of ourselves, but I also experienced it myself. Sure, I always had known that our hips hold our emotions, and working with hips will often bring people to tears of laughter or tears of sorrow, but I had never, somehow, equated this to acknowledging the deepest potential of asana, or the postures.

(Ok, a quick aside – the real reason is because I got caught up in the feeling that the 100% asana-focused practice of modern, American yoga is not real yoga, so I had to rebel against that. I have since softened my belief structure around that, and I know, and have always known, that we can never remove the body from the rest of our being, but yeah, I got caught in that American yoga vs. “real” yoga debate.)

In some ways, it is silly that I never acknowledged this deep connection. After all, I have always understood how the body is one of the first indicators of our deeper sanity and being. I still believe the breath is our greatest teacher, but the body is like its right-hand man. And if you want proof, look at your colleagues. Look at yourself. I would wager a fairly large bet you already know this.

I’m going to use myself as an example these past few weeks. Prior to the past two weeks, the last time I was sick for more than a day, maybe two, was two years ago, and that lasted about three days. It turns out it was a cold or allergies. I cannot remember the last time I got the flu, if ever, and I had not experienced stress-related stomach anxiety since the bar exam. (To be honest, I do not remember that, but someone else does, so knowing what I know about memory, I will go with hers.) Prior to that, the last time I felt it was in college. Growing up, my stomach was a pretty solid indicator of my stress levels. And I had a lot of stomach issues. I was, apparently, a stressed-out kid. I will spare you the details of my last two weeks, but let's just say, my body has informed me that I am a wee bit stressed.

So once again, yoga and the law have taught me the same lessons as two sides of the same coin. Yoga helped me move beyond the stress-response in my body, and I was rarely, if ever, sick, and the law brought me right back to what was always underneath it all. I have learned three things from this, and I think they are worth sharing with anyone out there who notices these issues.

First, I really do love my job. It is difficult, scary, and stressful, but I get to do work I hope is useful, and I work with some of the most amazing people I know. Not only do I like them, but I truly and deeply respect them. I work in a system that needs serious healing, but it is also a system in which everyone there is working to make it better. It may not be perfect yet, and probably never will be, but everyone cares, and that is a huge step in the right direction. Why does loving the work matter? Because I am willing to find ways to work within it rather than run away at 100 miles per hour and never looking back. 

Second, the body is a teacher. Yes, I knew this. Yes, I was listening. And yes, I was also ignoring the signs. I had work to do. And the downward spiral began. It ended in the same stomach anxiety I had not experienced in years. It resulted in headaches and a sore back. These are all the complaints of modern America. But these are complaints I had not been making myself for years. And that brings me to the third lesson.

Yoga works. Yep, it has been all over the news that yoga can cause physical pain. And guess what? I agree 100%!!! There is a reason I never teach headstands in my classes or even shoulderstands unless I know the students and know they are safe doing them. There are many, many days I do not do either because I know my body is not up for it. So, yes, yoga can cause harm . . . when done without care and attention. But when we tune in and listen, yoga works. We can use the body to calm the mind and the mind to ease the body. The back pain, headaches, and anxiety can begin to be calmed. Are they going to disappear forever? Probably not. When I was a camp counselor, our boss once said, we could easily prevent all the children from ever getting hurt by having them sit inside in a circle all day. But would that be camp? Nope. So we had to find a happy medium – keep the kids as safe as possible, but also let them be kids.

Our own lives are the same. We could do nothing and be safe, calm, and pain free. Or we can live life and learn to live it in a way that is as safe and calm and pain-free as possible each moment. The body is a great indicator, and one that yoga can help. When the body is in a state of pain, it is in a state of dis-ease. By learning to recognize the signs early, hopefully we can keep ourselves free of deeper disease.

How have you noticed this in your life?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2012, all rights reserved. 

Integration - body, mind, spirit, and beyond

Today’s Reverb10 Prompt is another that hit close to home and hit on a topic I have considered a lot this year. It is: “Body Integration This year, when did you feel the most integrated with your body? Did you have a moment where there wasn’t mind and body, but simply a cohesive YOU, alive and present?”

Being a yoga teacher means that I have studied the body a lot. During teacher training, I found myself fascinated by the body, the physical body through anatomy and also the energetic body, for which I never had the words to describe. Then I learned about the koshas and finally, my fascination with the body was given words and expression. But today’s prompt is about something slightly different - when I felt the most integrated with the body. Interestingly, it will come back to the koshas, but from a different angle.

My lawyer background makes me want to determine the definition of integration. The prompt defines it as pure cohesion between body and mind. I would add spirit to the definition. This is the point where we are as close to balance as we can ever be, where our inner perfection begins to shine through to our outer lives.

This integration happens for me in two arenas, and they perfectly embody the reason for this blog - one is in yoga, and the other is professionally. Integration often begins on the yoga mat. Certainly, it does not happen every time, but it is through the body that I have begun to understand my mental/psychological world so much more. The body is the gateway to so much more, and as I have begun to believe this, the world has opened up for me. I have written about body awareness and its effect on me, several times, such as here and here, so I will not go anymore into it in this post.

Instead, the second arena is more pertinent to professionals. There is perfect body mind integration when I am doing work that I absolutely love to do. For example, at the AFCC conference in Denver earlier this year, where I was inspired over and over again, I remember barely feeling my body, yet being absolutely in tune with everything it told me. It allowed me to do exactly what the conference offered even though I was giving it little rest and poor nutrition. 

This professional integration is the moment when you are in flow, when time goes by, and you do not even notice that it has moved. For me, this happens when I am doing legal work that involves children, reading about children’s issues around the world. It inspires me in ways I cannot put into words, which is how I know that it is pure integration. It is the reason I am heading to New Zealand to study their family law system, in order to help make ours better. When studying these issues, the world is opportunity, and imagination is the only limit.

Everyone has their own moment of such flow. Everyone has times when their body speaks to them, sometimes we enjoy those moments more than others. But the point is that you learn to utilize these moments because it is in these moments of body-mind integration that we hit our peak state. It is where we are capable of changing not only our own lives, but the world. It is in these moments that anything is truly possible.

I recently took a class on achieving business success, but we focused on so much more than just business success. The class began by asking “why do you do what you do?” The class ended asking us, “what makes you tick?” When we know the answers to these questions, our integration is in the most perfect balance it will ever achieve, and in that state, anything is possible.

Thus, my answer to today’s prompt goes right back to the koshas - the different koshas interact until they come into their optimum state. From there, we eventually reach bliss/divinity. Those moments can begin at any point, but the important piece is that we recognize them.

When are you most integrated between your body and mind?

Namaste and Blessings!

© 2010 Rebecca Stahl, all rights reserved

Gratitude, the mind, and deeper awareness

Although this blog has been on hiatus again, I love that Thanksgiving falls during my time writing about the koshas, especially the link between the mind and the next two koshas, the meditative and Divine koshas. Today, I want to focus on how Thanksgiving, or better yet, giving thanks and feeling gratitude work within those koshas.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. By no means do I think that way because of the Pilgrims and the eventual European taking-over of the continent. No, I mean that for one day, and really the entire week, people are all in a gratitude mindset. This energy of gratitude permeates the air and our hearts. The words “thank you” leave the mind and permeate the deeper koshas.

So, this is how the koshas work. In the mind, we say thank you. It has the potential to change our body, our breath, and all the way to our deepest awareness and connection to the Divine. As we say it more and more, it permeates deeper and deeper. As we live it, and the air breathes it, we become it. For one week, we get to be grateful together, and that gratitude brings us closer to one another and the Divine essence.

The mind is where we think; it is our logic center. The  vijnamaya kosha is where we perceive. It is where we can just be. Gratitude helps take us to that place. We can worry about the future and dwell on the past in the mind, but the deeper awareness knows that life unfolds exactly as it should. Some days it is easier to accept that than others, but when we start from a place of gratitude and thanks, we can go to that place more often. As Meister Eckhart has said,
“If the only prayer you said in your whole like was, ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.” The prayer of gratitude takes us to our deepest awareness.

So, this week of Thanksgiving, though mired in a history of destruction and despair, allows us to be together, to pray together, in the transition from mind to awareness and perception. We may move to the beat of our internal drummer, and there it never matters if that drummer is “different,” only that we are all in this together. From the 5 koshas in ourselves, we learn that our connection to each other grows as we go deeper through the koshas. And that is what leads us to the Divine because the Divine is that deepest connection we all share. I can think of no greater way to get there than through gratitude.

In that spirit, I know that I put off writing this post until Thanksgiving because this is when it needed to be written. Vijnamaya kosha needed to be about gratitude. Thank you for reading, for sharing in this community, and I hope to continue to share this journey together.

Blessings and Namaste!

© 2010 Rebecca Stahl, all rights reserved

A mental exercise

The third kosha, or layer/sheath, is the mental body, the Manomaya kosha. It is the kosha where most of us live most of our lives. It is where we determine that we are an “I” that is different than “the other(s).” It is where we live in the future and the past, instead of the present. It also includes our five senses, so deeper than the physical kosha, but still that which literally separates us from the rest of the world, but begins to connect us to it. It is how we interact with the world within our body.

I will probably spend at least two posts covering this kosha, so today, I want to discuss a concept that has been rolling around in my mental body for quite some time.

I loved law school. I know it sounds crazy, but I did. And I mean loved it; I loved the intellectual rigor, the theory, the discussions, and even moot court, where we got to argue pretend cases before pretend judges. I loved being asked to take a side - at times both sides of an issue and turn it into the winning argument. I loved writing and arguing cases in these mock situations. It gave me the sort of joy and motivation to keep going through what was a very rigorous and difficult three years of intellectual training. In short, it was fun and exciting.

It was nothing like doing it for real.

I do not mean that you cannot get that joy and excitement from the practice of law in the real world. Quite the contrary - many people thrive on it. They go into court believing in their client, their client’s story, and they think they cannot lose - no matter what. These are the people like David Boies who take only the big cases, and then take them all the way to the Supreme Court. I used to think I would love to be that kind of lawyer, the intellectual rigor of the profession being my motivation every day.

But then I realized the biggest difference between law school and the legal profession - real people. In law school, I remember reading cases with horrific facts - people being catapulted out of cars, falling down manholes, being questioned by the police without just cause, and the list goes on. I remember arguing that a school district had no duty to protect a homosexual student from tormenting by his peers (the side I was assigned to argue). I also remember stopping and thinking to myself that these were real people. These are not stories made up at a computer late at night but people whose lives were forever shattered.

When representing real people, seeing them in court, and knowing the destruction the legal world can have on them, the mental games stop being so fun and exciting. In family court, especially, where I spend so much of my time, this adversarial process is not only unworkable, it can be downright inhumane.

Like most people in the modern world, I spend a great deal of my life in the mental kosha. I thrive there. But yoga has helped me open up to the other koshas - the physical, the breath, and into the meditative and the divine. The mind is the great in-between. It is in the mental kosha that we go from being individuals to interconnected to the universe. It is here where we can get stuck, where we can ignore the fact that what might be a fun intellectual game is causing distress to the world. It is here where we can stop and realize that as much fun as it is to argue, there are consequences to that choice.

This has been a hard realization for me. As I find myself more and more dedicated to changing the way we do family law in this country - and perhaps law in general - I have had to struggle with the fact that I really enjoy it for all the reasons that practicing attorneys enjoy the current system. Intellectually, it is wonderful. But that cannot be the final reason we do what we do. I have learned, in the past two years of seeing real families day-after-day, that we all eventually have to move past our mental kosha and deeper into our connection to each other.

Interestingly, this is one area where the law and yoga have informed each other back and forth in my life, and I am grateful to each of them for giving me the opportunity to enjoy the mental games while learning that there is so much more. What mental stops do you find in your life? How do you work through them?

Namaste!

© 2010 Rebecca Stahl, all rights reserved

Breathing through Resistance

After all the blogging about the Mindful Lawyer conference, and then a full week of work, it is time to turn back to the blog and back to the series on koshas.  We started with an overview of the koshas and a look at how BKS Iyengar started his practice in his physical body, and then we moved onto the breath body. I am going to stay here for today because the breath can continue to teach us, and I heard a great quote at the conference that is ultimately relevant to the breath and its connection to the rest of our being.

 At the conference, one of the presenters presented on the connection of mindfulness and psychology. She said that one of her teachers likens suffering to a mathematical equation. Suffering = pain * resistance. Thus, if your pain is 10 units, and you resist it by 10 units, your suffering is 100 units. So, what happens when your pain is 10 units and you do not resist it? A common answer is 10 (especially at the conference), but that is because we did not all pay attention in basic arithmetic; the actual answer is 0. Any number multiplied by 0 is 0. Thus, when we are fully able to stop resisting, our suffering (not our pain) is reduced to nothing.

Yeah, right! That sounds lovely in theory, but how do we get there? Pain hurts, whether it is physical, emotional, spiritual, or some other form. So, how do we let go of our resistance to that pain in order to feel less, and ultimately no, suffering? We breathe!

I was a walking, alright limping, example of this phenomenon over the weekend and as I write this post. On Friday at the conference, I was a little less than mindful, and while carrying a large box down the stairs, I stumbled and sprained my ankle. The presentation about resistance and suffering was Saturday morning, and to be fair, I was in pain, not a lot, but it hurt to walk. Of course, during the presentation, and throughout the weekend, my focus was on my ankle. Each time it stung, I breathed. Did all the pain go away? No, of course not. But a lot of it did, and I noticed that as I got upset about it, the pain got worse. When I laughed about it, breathed through it, and tried not to resist it, the pain decreased.

So, how does this affect us as lawyers and people in this stressed-out world? We always have our breath. We always get to choose how whether we react or respond to events in our lives. In law, as in life, sometimes situations do not go our way. Sometimes, we even take it personally, especially in our life. The breath reminds us that we need not resist those moments.

Pain, in all its forms, is a reminder that something is out of balance. The pain itself is not bad, just a reminder.  Emotionally, pain reminds us that we care, and we truly are all connected to one another. Physically, pain reminds us to slow down.  What we do with that pain is our choice. The yogis have told us that when each of our koshas is in balance, we are in balance. Thus, the breath helps bring us back to that balance in each of our other koshas. It reminds us that nothing is permanent, even pain. So, taking the energy out of the pain by not resisting it is like taking the oxygen away from the fire. Without the fuel, it eventually burns out on its own. The breath helps us let that happen quicker, safer, and with control. From there, we can move forward and come back to a place of balance, in our lives as well as our koshas.

Namaste.

© 2010 Rebecca Stahl, all rights reserved.

Finding the Breath . . .

As I mentioned in my last post, I am writing a series on the five koshas, or sheaths/bodies. They are 1) the physical body, 2) the breath body, 3) the mental body, 4) the intellectual/meditative body, and 5) the Divine body. Today, I am going to focus on the breath body.

I feel like this topic could be a book – how our breath affects our life and vice versa. I will, however, try to keep it short and perhaps return to the topic again. In many ways, the breath is our greatest teacher. It also rejuvenates us when we are tired and calms us when we are nervous. Our breath is our first connection to the depths of our being once we get past the physical body.

As important as the breath is, many of us simply ignore it. How often do we take conscious breaths. After all, breathing is one of the functions that will continue no matter how little attention we pay it. In this world, where there are hundreds, if not thousands, of issues that arise every day vying for our attention, is it any wonder that the parts of our lives that are automatic we allow to take care of themselves?

As noted in the last post, in order for us to function at our best, all of the koshas must act in balance. Thus, if we are to be able to fully utilize our brainpower and our intellect, our breath must be in balance and must be fully functioning. There are numerous breath techniques, each with its own healing properties, but this post is called “finding” the breath, so we are going to focus on that. The first step, before we ever get to the particular techniques, is to locate the breath and bring our awareness to it.

This is one of those, “easy to say, hard to do” moments. When we get caught up in life, in stress, in physical pain, in mental blocks, etc., the last place we want to turn our attention is to our breath, but often, when we do, and we take that deep breath in and just let it out, the problem we face shrinks in size. Does it go away? Of course not (well, sometimes it does, but rarely). Instead, the breath is our reset button, and it tells the body and the mind that they get to start over. Just like restarting a computer, sometimes that provides enough to face the moment with a new sense of purpose.

So why did I start by saying that the breath is our greatest teacher? Well, when we learn to tune into our breath and notice it, we can begin to understand the state of our body and mind from a new perspective. When our breath is short and shallow, very often our chest feels constricted and our thoughts come and go with no real focus. When, by contrast, our breath is long and deep, we feel more open and lighter, and our thoughts begin to focus, and we are better able to concentrate and move through our days with intention. The breath helps us know where we are.

So, take a deep breath, and ask yourself, “what is my breath telling me?” If you lost it before, try to find it and learn what it has to offer.

Namaste and Blessings.

© 2010, Rebecca Stahl all rights reserved. 

Where the body can take us . . .

My last post focused on BKS Iyengar’s yoga beginnings: a purely physical practice. The physical body is that which we first understand and see in a yoga practice. But why in a practice designed originally to help us sit in meditation longer is the physical practice the first (and sometimes only) association people make to yoga in the west? The yogis have helped us here as well. Yoga principles/philosophy talk about the koshas or “sheaths.” They are our five “bodies” and can be likened to the layers of an onion - each one revealing something deeper within us.

The five koshas are: 1) Annamaya Kosha (physical body), 2) Pranamaya Kosha (breath body), 3) Manomaya Kosha (mind/mental body), 4) Vijnamaya Kosha (wisdom/meditative body), and 5) Anandamaya Kosha (bliss/divine kosha).

I have written before about how my time in Yoga Teacher Training helped me see the depths the physical practice can take us and how important a teacher the body really is. Each day, I struggle to understand how what is happening to me physically affects me emotionally. But then I go further: In workshops I present to lawyers, as well as my yoga classes, I talk about how the breath is our greatest teacher. When the breath is shallow, we are not living our full potential. A shallow, quick breath often reflects a flitting mind, one unable to focus and be at its fullest potential.

What I did not realize is that I was understanding the koshas without naming them. When the koshas are in balance, we function at our best and act from our deepest potential. Yoga, as an integrative practice, allows us to utilize all of them together, flowing from one to the next, opening us to our deepest spirit and greatest way of being.

Thus, the body is the entryway to the deeper parts of our being. The physical practice leads us to understanding our breath, which begins to quiet the mind, which allows us to be in meditative stillness for longer and longer periods of time, which eventually leads us to our deepest sense of being. When a part of the body is not working to its fullest potential, sometimes the only remedy we need is the breath. Sometimes, we need to revamp our entire way of being and connecting with the world. The closer our koshas are to alignment and balance with each other, the more able we are to know what it is that will bring the body itself back to balance.

But just as going deeper allows us to understand the body, the body helps us understand our deeper self. Iyengar, a very sickly child, came to yoga to cure his physical ailments. As he describes it, that led him down a path that completely transformed his life, and his life has been about yoga, in all its forms ever since that time.

The next posts are going to continue this discussion about the koshas and their balance, but I would like to hear from you what brought you to yoga. Was it for exercise? Stress relief? Fit in your schedule? Friend? Please share your stories in the comments.

Blessings and Namaste!

© 2010 Rebecca Stahl, all rights reserved