Getting Ready for a New Community

I am currently in the San Francisco Bay Area getting ready for the first ever Mindful Lawyer Conference to be held October 29-31. These jam-packed three days are full of mindfulness meditation practices and studies for law students, lawyers, and judges. Almost exactly one year ago today (missed my one year anniversary on October 24 - also my mommy’s birthday) I started writing this blog. I was striving to unite the duality in my life between yoga and the law, feeling a bit like an outsider in each.

In the past year, I have become a yoga teacher, started teaching Stress Management workshops for lawyers that focus on meditation and yoga, and I have been accepted as a Fulbright Scholar to study family law in New Zealand. Recently, I was asked to determine, for myself, why I do what I do - what inspires me. The answer is simple: I want to help provide people the tools they need to learn to help themselves. From family law to yoga to meditation, that is my driving force.

What does all of this have to do with the conference? Community is what provides the best inspiration. I felt pretty alone in law school. Sure, there were other people interested in yoga, but many of them used it just for exercise. At the yoga studio, I have met some lawyers, but for some reason, we did not connect professionally. But then I started writing this blog, and the universe provided me the connections. This conference feels like the culmination of that to me.

I have written before about the powerful inspiration that occurs in conferences. At the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts conference, I did not sleep, but I never felt more alive because of the power created by the community. The AFCC mid-year conference is this weekend, but I knew I had to connect to a new crowd, one that would help me feel connected and fully fulfilled in all areas of my life by attending the Mindful Lawyer Conference. So, I will continue to blog about it, continue to give updates about it. I am volunteering and teaching a morning yoga class. I am so excited to be a part of this growing community, and I cannot wait to share it with all of you.

Namaste and Blessings.

© 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

A Western Yogi?

I have finally begun reading “Light on Life” by BKS Iyengar. Iyengar is the man who brought yoga to the West about 50 years ago. His first book, “Light on Yoga” is often called the Yoga Bible, for it contains pictures and explanations of nearly every asana. It is both intimidating and awe-inspiring. Flipping through it, you see a man in positions that appear to be possible only if you remove your spine and perhaps a few other bones along the way. But this new book sheds a different light – Iyengar was born sickly and spent so much of his early years sick that this son-of-a-school teacher fell behind in his studies in school because he could never attend.

Today, he is considered the father of yoga in the west.

I have a feeling that many of my next posts will focus on what he discusses in this book - I have just finished the introduction – but today I want to focus on the relief this introduction has granted me.

Iyengar writes: “Most of those who begin to practice yogasana, the poses of yoga, do so for practical and often physical reasons. . . . Very few people begin yoga because they believe it will be a way to achieve spiritual enlightenment, and indeed a good number may be quite skeptical about the whole idea of spiritual realization. Actually, this is not a bad thing because it means most of the people who come to yoga are practical people who have practical problems and aims – people who are grounded in the ways and means of life, people who are sensible.”

I have struggled, from writing this blog to teaching yoga to presenting workshops to even chatting with friends, about how best to describe that which “is” yoga. How do I bring this practice that changes lives to the practical lives of lawyers and others? Reading that BKS Iyengar started yoga purely for its physical benefits removes some of that pressure. We all come to yoga for different reasons. Personally, I was looking for a way to relieve stress and anxiety, but most people in the West consider yoga a physical practice. This past year, I have learned the power of that physical practice to influence everything in life.

A mere five pages after opening the door to the practical yogi, Iyengar reminds us, “Yoga releases the creative potential of Life.”

For thousands of years, spiritual teachings were hidden away in caves, to be passed from guru to student, hidden from regular people, but the generation of teachers who consist of BKS Iyengar, the Dalai Lama, and Trungpa Rinpoche (Shambhala Buddhism), knew that if we are to survive this crazy time in the world, the speed with which we obtain information and the ability to travel the world in 24 hours, we would have to have a foundation. So, they brought the teachings out of hiding, and they gave us ways to use them in everyday life.

We are the beneficiaries of their courage. We may get it wrong, not go as deep, not fully understand everything those teachings contain, but it is a path, it is a practice. And it is the practical aspect of yoga that this blog is aiming to pass on. How can we learn from the body what we can do in our lives? How can we learn from the breath whether we are stressed? How can we learn from our inner selves what we need to do each moment? These are what make yoga so powerful, and it need not matter why we begin to practice or even how we begin to practice, only that we do begin to practice. The rest will take care of itself.

I hope that Iyengar’s words can inspire you to begin somewhere and allow yourself to open up to the creative potential of your life and our shared Life. Why did you start yoga? What did you originally want to gain? How has it transformed you in ways you never expected?

Thank you for being part of this community.

Namaste and Blessings!

© 2010 Rebecca Stahl, all rights reserved

The life and work of Transitions

When I stop to consider how yoga has affected my daily life, how it affects each action, two thoughts come to mind - intention and transition. As this period of my life is a long-winded transition, that has been my focus these past few weeks.

Yoga is the perfect opportunity to notice those moments that we often ignore, and when we ignore, can lead to physical and emotional turmoil, or in the case of the workplace, stress. Yoga, when viewed as meditation in motion, brings us back to the present moment, each moment. Our breath is our reminder that we are here now, and we can focus on now. While this is a wonderful meditation, and one I will explore more fully another day, there is a more physical way that yoga teaches us to transition gracefully and with strength - vinyasa.

Vinyasa literally means breath synchronized with flow. When broken down into its roots, however, it means “to place in a special way.” So, when we are flowing between poses in a yoga class, we are being asked to place each movement in a special way, to notice each movement between the postures.

As a yoga student, I have had days where I move through the transition poses without any thought, other days where they are the focus of my practice. On the latter days, I leave class feeling more connected, more focused, and more centered. Noticing the transitions allows each moment, each asana, to be strong and steady. It also helps bring me to the more esoteric place of being in the now - the eventual “goal.” Those days, I see that every moment is special, just not the moments during the day that we think are supposed to be special.

As a yoga teacher, I see students who practice without the conscious awareness on the transitions. Between plank (push-up) and chataranga (bottom of a push-up), their hearts literally collapse, with no awareness to hold them up. Often, this is because people in a yoga class do not want to put their knees down to provide the strength for that transition, but want to prove to themselves that they can move without that aid. I did it for years. But as a teacher, it looks painful, and that moment of awareness is lost. I know that without proper alignment, these students can hurt themselves physically, and that physical pain can lead to emotional and psychological pain and stress. I see people rush through transitions to get somewhere, but the next posture is not the goal - the goal is awareness.

It has taken me years to fully grasp the importance of transitions in the physical asana practice. I “got it” intellectually. That’s the lawyer in me. I never understood is physiologically. But the day I got it, my practice changed; my life changed.

During a day at work, we can have 15 things to do. If we refuse to take the time to transition between them, our brain never gets a break, and each item on our to-do list becomes one confusing mess. Those moments of transition are moments to reset, to acknowledge that one item has ended, and it is time to move onto the next one. For lawyers, this can help us remember that each client is different. We stop putting Bob’s name where Jane’s should be. (After reading what some lawyers write, I know that this is a common problem.)

Outside the workplace, learning to transition with awareness reminds us that nothing in life is permanent. We are constantly in a state of change, and that is nothing to be feared, but rather revered. Benjamin Franklin once said, “When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.” It can be easy to get caught up in the big moments in life, the phone calls, the memos, the clients, the vacations, the school day, whatever those big moments are, but it is the awareness we bring to the moments in between that define the strength with which we can move into, and be fully present with, those big moments.

Transitions are where we create the strength and the awareness that can make the big moments in our lives full and unique. How do you transition between tasks and daily actions?

Namaste!

Ⓒ 2010 Rebecca Stahl, all rights reserved

Making the Connection

These past few weeks have been super busy; I have been learning how to be self-employed. For weeks, I called it unemployed or “in transition.” I am, after all, leaving for New Zealand in January, so I know that whatever happens, it is short term. But making the semantic transition has helped me move beyond a rut - the rut of inactivity. This same rut is why I have not posted in so long.

But what of the title? What connection? Well, Is Yoga Legal finally went public. This blog began as a way to connect my two seemingly polar opposite worlds. This past Saturday, I offered the first of what I hope to be many Stress Management Workshops for lawyers. They, of course, focus on yoga and meditation techniques for the office. And they do not stop at desk-asana and meditation and breathing. They focus on all the areas this blog has covered, from reaction vs. responses to topics we have yet to cover on the blog.

What have I learned? This workshop is not only necessary for the legal profession - talk about stressed-out professionals - but lawyers like yoga! It felt like I found a home teaching these workshops. Certainly, I need to make adjustments to them, but I was able to talk about all aspects of yoga, far beyond the physical postures, and people responded.

It felt so wonderful to see a group of people whose lives are usually so full of stress take a moment to breathe, talk about meditation, and recognize that we can help each other. It was great to see people in the room who make yoga a daily part of their lives right next to people who have never considered ever practicing before. Both were willing to stop for a moment and be present.

I hope these workshops continue to provide people tools for the workplace. I hope they also provide lawyers a place where they can see that stress is not always bad, it is when the stress becomes uncontrollable that the problems arise. Most importantly, I want people to know that their lives need not be disasters. There are simple tools that can help make each day easier.

Of course, this does not mean that each day is easy. I am a perfect example. The few days before the first workshop I was a complete ball of stress. But then someone reminded me that fear and excitement are the same energy. I changed (mostly) my interpretation of the balls of energy to excitement from fear, and I went to a restorative yoga class Friday night. Saturday went great! Then I collapsed.

As I continue to navigate this path of being a lawyer-yogi, I hope to bring others along and create a community of people who can help each other when the going gets tough. I hope this blog can be a start of that community. Share your comments on your favorite stress management techniques. After all, making the connection is the first step.

Namaste and Blessings!

© 2010 Rebecca Stahl, all rights reserved

Our own point of view . . .

“Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.” - Obi Wan Kenobi

Yes, I just quoted Star Wars, but I told you before that I’m a Star Wars geek. But really, I can think of no better way of saying what Obi Wan makes so clear here. Did Darth Vader kill Luke’s father, or was he Luke’s father? Well, both. It depends on Luke’s point of view.

Lawyers get paid to have a point of view and to stick with it. After all, we must protect our clients’ position, and our clients’ positions become our own. Yoga, on the other hand, teaches us to see life from many points of view. Inversions literally force us to look at the world upside down. In my second post, I talked about the need to let go and see the argument from the other side, to let go of only one way of seeing the world in order to see the full picture.

But how does our perspective change our own outlooks? As of August 20, I no longer work at the court. My job was only scheduled to last one year, and that is when it ended. So, for two weeks now, I have been “unemployed.” Sure, I have found some contract work, and I have been teaching yoga, but without full-time employment, I was feeling a bit rejected, even having the time to attend 1-2 yoga classes per day.

This morning, my perspective changed.

While taking a walk this morning (another benefit of being without full-time employment), I realized that this unemployment has allowed me to reach out to people I would not have otherwise met. I have sent 100 or so emails to various people asking for work. Through those emails I have talked to several people, and I have some more meetings set up. I have also set up my first Stress Management for Lawyers through Yoga and Meditation workshop, which is exactly what I want to be doing.

It is an old mantra - bad situations are just blessings in disguise; we should see the opportunity even in difficult situations; when life throws you lemons, make lemonade. But cliches become cliches for a reason - they are true. And yes, it is true that each situation, even if it looks terrible, has the potential to be an amazing opportunity with a little change in perspective.

Of course, this is not always the case. Some situations are truly difficult, but as I said in the last post, learning to respond, rather than react, allows us to change our perspective and confront situations with all of the necessary information. Yoga gives us the strength and courage to allow our points of views to be dismantled. It can be scary and hard, but in the end, it could just lead to the winning argument.

Namaste!