The Subtlest Movements

I finally attended my first Feldenkrais class last week. For those who do not know, Feldenkrais is a body movement / awareness technique. Really, it is more of an awareness technique. In many ways, the Feldenkrais method is the antithesis to modern culture, and that is its beauty.

We live in a world where bigger is better. Exercise fanatics say, “no pain, no gain.” Feldenkrais is the opposite – how small can the movement get where you still feel a change? Can you simply imagine a movement and notice?

The answer is yes. And therein lies the power.

The human body is incredible. It holds answers to so many of our ailments and protects us from ourselves. We hold our emotions, fears, and excitements in our body. From it, we derive pleasure and pain and everything in between. Our bodies are our greatest tool for understanding. It is through our senses that we understand the outside world, but we have an additional way of understanding called proprioception.  Proprioception is our understanding of how our body fits together and moves relative to itself.

Proprioception is about understanding ourselves so well we can relate better to others. It is the minutest form of understanding, but when we can understand on that deep of a level, the macro understandings become easier. It is similar to how meditation works – if we can slow down the mind enough, we can understand it better, and then the mind becomes an ally instead of an enemy. But as I explore more and more, I am beginning to understand how important the body is to that process. It is, I think, why yoga became such an important part of my life. It became the way I could meditate most easily. But now, with my body not cooperating, I have had to find ways other than through an asana practice . . . and my understanding has grown exponentially.

More and more, doctors of western medicine are realizing how connected the body and mind are. They tell us that stress can cause ailments like ulcers. I believe it will be a long time before the run-of-the-mill MD writes the word disease as dis-ease, but the tide is turning. My yoga/proprioception exploration has shown me a deeper level. The body and mind are not connected – they are the same thing. There is no separateness between them that needs to be connected.

I have known this for years, but I have never been able to articulate it or to fully understand it. I have read countless books about it, but somehow the Knowing did not come until recently. It was not until I opened my mouth and said it one day that I realized how deeply this went.

And it was then that I also realized how deeply this affects our lives. My experience of body therapies has always been my access point to experience the mind and spirit. The concept of proprioception was, in some ways, another way of accessing qi or prana, the life forces of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Yoga. I have come to understand how important it is for us to move slower in life and as we make change to make it in simple and quiet ways. As we notice the body, we notice the world.

We live in a world where Cross Fit and Bikram Yoga dominate our mentality. There is nothing inherently wrong with either, but the more I come to understand, the more I see how important it is to come at change from a different angle, a simpler angle. This is, perhaps, especially important when dealing with the spirit and emotions. Society tells us it is inappropriate to share our emotions with one another, to express true anger and sadness. Even true happiness is considered out of place in expression. So instead of expressing our emotions, we suppress them. We hide them deep within ourselves, and they try to appear, but we hide them more.

This can lead to a variety of types of dis-ease, and sometimes accessing our true emotional and spiritual state helps bring us back to a place of ease. But it is like taking the cork out of a champagne bottle. We can do it quickly and explode the cork across the room, potentially taking out someone’s eye with it. Or we can be calm and slow about it and open the cork in such a way that we can access the goodness inside calmly and safely.

The first step here is just to notice. Notice how moving your head from side to side moves other parts of your body. Notice how you can feel simply by imagining movements. Notice, notice, and then notice some more. The irony, of course, is that the smaller the movement, the greater the shift. It takes incredible conscious awareness to notice the smallest movements, and that consciousness is what shifts. When we get away from momentum and move toward true awareness, the world comes into focus. That does, of course, require slowing down.

Are you willing to give it a try?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2014, all rights reserved.

The post, The Subtlest Movements, first appeared on Is Yoga Legal.

The Power of a Smile

How often do we talk about smiling? Phrases such as “Turn that frown upside down” are cute ways of telling us that smiling is better than frowning. There is controversy over whether it takes more muscles to smile than frown, but everyone has their version, and many like to share it. And of course, there is the old adage that we can “fake it til we make it.” In other words, we can make ourselves happier just by smiling. We talk about it a lot, but do we ever actually think about the power that a simple smile holds?

When I was in band in high school, my parents (and other band parents) would always come up to me after concerts to tell me how serious I looked. As some people got to know me better over the years, they even went so far as to tell me that I looked downright dangerous. I always just laughed. How serious could I really look? Once in a yoga class, I was in reclining virasana, one of my favorite poses, and I was happy as a clam. The teacher came over to ask me if I was ok. Apparently I did not look happy as a clam. It continues, and one of my current teachers now just walks over and places her hands on my head and says, “relax your brow.”

My response to these situations has changed over the years. As a high school musician, I was confused. Did I really look that bad? The first time in yoga, I tried to be serious about not being so serious. Now I just laugh.

When I teach, I tend to teach hard poses in a similar way. I start at the beginning, move through the pose step-by-step, and then just as everyone looks like they are struggling as much as they can, my instruction is nearly always the same, “now smile.” I have never really thought much about why I do that, but as I am being reminded more and more by the same teacher how serious I am, I have started to ponder the power of the smile.

First, there is some, actually a lot, of truth to the “fake it til you make it” mentality. Simply smiling really does release endorphins, which help us feel happier. Over time, we really can become happier. That is a powerful benefit, but it is not the only one. Smiling, especially in the midst of being tense, releases that tension. A smile can snap us out of a different state simply by being different. Finally, and this might be the best lesson for me, it reminds us to take ourselves less seriously.

I deal with a lot of serious stuff every day. I work with kids who have been removed by Child Protective Services. But even if your day job does not involve CPS, we all feel the seriousness of the world. There are wars raging, people starving, homeless people on the street, and whatever else the media wants to bombard us with. One of the only ways to remove ourselves from that onslaught of seriousness and unhappiness, is to break the cycle. Breaking the cycle starts with a smile. It is the antidote, the way to snap ourselves out of the collective serious world.

This is not to say that those issues should not be addressed in a serious way. In many ways, I find it difficult to smile in the face of so much distress, but then I remember that it might be the key to actually bringing light to those situations. We can start to break their cycle with a wee smile.

Smiles help us relax. Those endorphins do more than just make us happier. They actually help put us back on the path to overcome the fight or flight response. A smile breaks the stress cycle. Once we are able to break that stress cycle, we can begin to see the world from a more holistic vision. Stress gives us a very narrow focus – either run away from danger or freeze in its face. But once we break that cycle, other options open. A smile is the first step.

When I look back at my confused reaction in high school I wonder if I could have had more fun and been less singularly focused, would I have been a better musician? Maybe I would have actually gotten into music school? But then I would not be on this path, and that definitely is not something to smile about. I am happy to use it as a reference, and now those memories simply bring a smile to my face.

Who knew that such a simple act could be so powerful?

How have smiles helped you break cycles in your life? When is your favorite time to remind yourself to smile?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2012, all rights reserved. 

A Very Simple Lens

“This issue should be viewed through the very simple lens of a crime having been committed.”

This sentence was uttered by a lawyer at a conference I attended this past weekend. The context is not important, and this blog is not the place to discuss the particular issues associated with the context. But it is absolutely a place to talk about the phrase, “a very simple lens.”

If I have learned anything by studying the law and yoga together, it is that the only simple statement I can make is that there is no simple lens of anything. There is no simple way to see the issues we face every single day as lawyers, nor as people generally. And our interconnected world is making this evident on levels and in situations we have never before experienced.

As I have mentioned before, there is rarely, if ever, one truth. We all see the world through our own concepts of our subjective truths. Most days I wish there were a single, simple truth that we could view through a single, simple lens. Life would be easier. This is why we hold our communities of like-minded individuals close. We preach to our own choir, and we forward emails with which we agree and delete those with which we disagree. I do it as well sometimes. Often it is with a pang of regret, but I tell myself it is because I do not have enough time for those emails. I will talk to people with whom I disagree, but I do not read their emails apparently. That is a line I have drawn many times.

But that is no longer an option. We can no longer live in the bubbles in which we would sometimes like to hide. We can see the entire world too easily. Lawyers meet yogis and realize they are not all chanting and meditating on a mountain (though the thought is nice at times). Yogis meet lawyers and realize they are not all money-hungry, corporation-protecting monsters. The CEO of Starbucks, a gigantic corporation, says we should take corporate money out of politics until the politicians get their acts together. The simplicity of putting people into a box becomes impossible the moment we open our eyes to all that people can be.

Unfortunately, the more difficult it becomes to actually see the world through a simple lens, the more some people attempt to do it. I actually think this is why we are witnessing such polarizing political worldviews today. We are becoming overwhelmed with the information overload, and we are not taking the time away from that overload and giving ourselves a break. No one, without serious practice, can be expected to jump into seeing issues from all sides. It simply, pardon the phrase, does not fit into the biological structure of fight-or-flight. It is evolutionarily safer to put people into a box of good or bad because then we know whether to allow them in or to kill them to save ourselves.

And it is also difficult and scary on an emotional and psychological level. What if the way I view the world is wrong? What if the way I see my truth is not real? The simple lens is so much easier, less time consuming, and immediately safer.

But in a more and more connected world, it is no longer a possibility. We no longer live in a world where everything must be viewed as a threat. Instead, we exist in a world where we must learn to see each other fully, or we will destroy ourselves. Albert Einstein once said, “I do not know with what weapons World War Three will be fought, but I know that World War Four will be fought with sticks and stones.”

We can no longer afford simple.

Lawyers are trained to cling to one truth or another, to find the simplest way to explain a situation, and this causes us, at times, to start to see the world in black and white terms. This does not mean all do; in fact, most lawyers I know see nuance and context more than simplicity. But the training is there, and the vestiges remain. Yogis, by contrast, are trained to open to new possibilities, whether in a physical asana or in a mental practice. Like lawyers, not all yogis do as they are trained, and many turn into fundamentalists convinced their way is the only way.

Do you notice yourself seeing the world through a simple lens? Are there particular areas you notice it more than others? What do you do about it when you notice it?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2012, all rights reserved.