Flexibility of Mind

This is a wonderful article about the complexities of truth in asana. What is true in our bodies today may not be true tomorrow, what is true for one student may not be true for the next, and the level of understanding we have about a pose may make our previous understanding obsolete.

Teaching students--not poses--can be a spiritual practice that requires the teacher to understand truth in all of its complexity ~ by Aadil Palkhivala

Effective yoga teachers teach people, not poses. How can we become better able to respond to our students’ individual needs and capabilities? As I travel around the country giving workshops for teachers, I repeatedly see many inexperienced teachers gravitate toward the comforting idea that there is only one way to teach a pose—the "right way," the "best way," the "way Aadil did it last time." The idea that "one pose fits all" not only stunts our growth as yoga teachers but often harms our students.

Instead of fixing our minds on a single solution, the art is to develop flexibility of mind and accept that there may be as many ways of teaching a pose as there are students. Whenever we give an instruction, we must approach it from the perspective that our words are only appropriate for that particular person at that particular time, not that they are absolute rules unto themselves. Many ways of teaching a pose can be true or "right"—it all depends on the student we are teaching and the effect we desire. Flexibility of mind allows us to develop a repertoire of ways to teach a pose, making us able to respond to any student or situation. As William Blake wrote, "One law for the ox and for the ass is oppression."

Levels of Truth

As our students evolve, as their understanding develops and refines, our instructions must evolve as well. For example, in the beginning, we tell our students, "Straighten your leg." Although this is a very coarse truth, new students need to hear it, and it is about all they need to hear at first. Once they have grasped it, we can tell them a bit more about how to straighten their leg: "Lift the quadriceps and press your heels into the floor" refines the same truth and reflects the development of the students’ understanding. The next level of refinement might be, "Resist with the calf muscle so that the knee does not hyper-extend while lifting your quadriceps and pressing your heels into the floor." The next level might be, "As you press the floor with your heels, also press down with the big toe mound and the outer edge of the foot. Press the bones into the earth while lifting the flesh away from the earth." Then, "As you press the bones down and lift the flesh, watch the way you are pressing down and lifting. Make the lift a recoiling action by firmly pressing the big toe mound and inner heel into the floor while recoiling the arch up the inner leg." The next level may be, "Now watch the actions. Are the actions in the skin, in the flesh, or in the bones? Work the descent of the bones separately from the recoil of the flesh and separately from the unmoved calmness of the skin."

All these levels, some of which might be quite advanced for the student, are refinements of the same instruction to "straighten the leg." The subtlety of our instruction must change with the student’s growing understanding. The more refined the level of truth, the more awareness the student must have to attain it. As students reach higher and higher levels of truth, they become more sensitive to the connection between their minds and their bodies, evolving from crudeness to refinement.

Still, while a more refined truth is a more accurate truth, it is completely useless and possibly detrimental to state the more accurate truth to a beginner. As teachers, we must decide what truth level will allow a student to grow and be safe at the same time. Therefore, we might teach one student one action while teaching another student a different action in the same pose, because they are at different levels of understanding and development. In Adho Mukha Svanasana (Downward-Facing Dog), for example, a student who has the lift in the pelvis should be working to bring the head down, while a student who sinks into the head should be learning to expand or extend the spine. It is not a question of what is right and wrong, but of what is appropriate for the student. This concept of truth levels allows each student to grow at her own pace.

Truths Often Contradict Each Other

What is a true instruction for a student today may no longer be true tomorrow. Often, one truth will contradict another, and flexibility of mind is required to allow both truths to be true. For example, the instruction "Straighten the leg completely, locking the knees" seems to contradict the next level of truth, "Don’t straighten the leg completely, but resist with the calf muscle and microbend the knee to protect it." A student who cannot straighten her leg (the first truth) will not be able to feel the resistance of the calf muscle which will allow her to microbend her knee (the second truth). Thus, while the first level is necessary for the second to happen, an evolved truth may contradict a prior one, making it obsolete.

When we teach beginners to do backbends, we ask them to keep the lumbar long and extended so that it doesn’t get jammed. In other words, we ask the beginning student to remove the curve from the lumbar spine while doing backbends. This is a lower level of truth that must be contradicted for advanced backbends, in which we ask students to cultivate a curve in the lumbar spine to prevent injury in the thoracic spine.

While teaching Salamba Sirsasana (Supported Headstand),we instruct beginning students to press their arms, wrists, little fingers, and elbows strongly into the floor, taking less weight on the head. However, as students learn to place the arms more accurately and retain the curvature of the neck, we ask them to take more weight on the head. Later, we ask them to take equal weight between the head and the arms. Eventually, when the students have become stable and strong, with well-aligned necks and lifted thoracic spines and shoulder blades, we ask them to take full weight on the head, using the arms only for balance. With regard to this weight-bearing action, a later truth contradicts an earlier truth as we move the student from the physical body to the energetic body.

Variations for Different Effects

Not only does each pose have many levels of refinement, but we can vary each pose to create different effects. For example, if a woman is nine months pregnant, then flat Savasana (Corpse Pose) is dangerous for the unborn child, even if she’s supple and able to do it. The woman must lie on her left side to prevent blocking the blood supply to the fetus. This is not a different truth level but a different posture. Similarly, if a person has stiff hamstrings and a stiff upper back, we might put a roll under his knees and a pad under his head. This is not the perfect pose for a person who is supple but an ideal pose for someone who is stiff. The stiff person would not get the full benefit of the pose if he were to do it flat, while a supple person would be less able to relax deeply into the pose using pads. We must have the flexibility of mind to allow these variations in order to keep our students safe.

The Effect Is What Is Important

Flexibility of mind allows us to understand that the same instruction may have opposite effects in two students. An instruction to relax in Uttanasana (Standing Forward Bend) might cause pain in the back of a student with stiff hamstrings, while it may bring pleasure to the spine of a student with open hamstrings. Conversely, opposite instructions may achieve the same result. To obtain a calm, wide diaphragm in Tadasana (Mountain Pose), we may ask a student who puffs his chest to relax the it, while we may ask another who has collapsed his chest to lift it.

We must learn to focus our minds on the effects and benefits we wish for our students, and vary our instructions to fit those intentions. If we focus instead on the form that the student must attain because it is the "perfect form"—the ideal pose, the highest truth—then we may harm rather than help our students.

Developing Flexibility of Mind

How do we develop this flexibility of mind? In a word, by apprenticing. Work with an experienced teacher. All arts and crafts, including medicine and yoga, were once taught in this manner. Changing social and financial circumstances have altered this custom, yet apprenticeship will always remain the most effective way to transmit an art and its lineage. To develop flexibility of mind and a repertoire of ways of teaching poses, find an experienced teacher and work with her. This will help you help all your students—and isn’t that what teaching is all about?

This article is excerpted from a forthcoming book called Teaching the Yamas and Niyamas by Aadil Palkhivala. Read the full article here: http://www.yogajournal.com/for_teachers/1011.

A Practice of Noticing

Continuing on with our truth-seeking and self reflection....

I found an insightful article by Sally Kempton talking about how to delve into your own feelings and peel back the layers of emotions wrapping the heart. Here's the exercise she details:

Start with Yourself. If you want to practice with intense energies, a good way to start is with your own feelings and moods, and to start small. Stephen Levine once wrote that working with heavy emotional issues can be like getting into the ring with a 500-pound wrestler—if you haven't trained for it, the wrestler will throw you in the first clench. One of the best ways to train for working with energy is to practice during private moments of meltdown.

One of my favorite times for this kind of practice is the onset of road rage. Like many otherwise reasonable people, I have an inner road warrior who emerges only when I'm alone behind the wheel. He's mouthy, cynical, easily offended—a cross between a New York City cabbie and one of those eccentric hit men from a Quentin Tarantino film. There's a lot of energy in this persona, however. So when I notice myself having snarly private dialogues with a driver who has cut me off at an exit, I try to use the occasion for exploring the energy inside my anger.

You can do this too, anytime. First, take a moment to remember one of your characteristic heavy emotions or the last time you were very angry, grief-stricken, or scared. When you've found the feeling you want to work with, here's what to do:

Acknowledge your feeling. Notice and identify the fact that your inner world has been rocked by an intense, primitive feeling. This is especially important when you've been ambushed by an emotion. It helps to say clearly to yourself, "I'm feeling angry," or, "I'm sad," or, "I'm upset." You don't have to analyze the feeling or even think about where it's coming from.

Pause. Stop yourself from acting on the feeling. To do this, focus on your breathing, following your breath as it moves in and out through your nostrils.

Get grounded. When we're experiencing strong emotions, we often lose touch with our physical body. To get grounded inside your body, bring your attention to the sensation of your feet on the ground; if you're sitting, feel the contact between your buttocks and the cushion or floor.

Bring your awareness into your heart. Once you're grounded, find your center in your heart—not your physical heart but your inner heart, the subtle energy space in the center of your body. If you touch your finger to the spot on your breastbone right between your nipples, you will probably find that there's a slight hollow there and even an achy feeling. Behind this little hollow lies your inner heart. Drop your attention into this center, using your breath as an anchor. Breathe in and out as if you were breathing in and out of your heart. Do this for a few minutes.

Explore the energy in the feeling. Once you have found your center like this, focus again on the feeling you are working with. Where is it in your body? How does it feel? This is not an analytical process; it is more of an exploration. You are giving yourself permission to fully feel and explore the inner sensations created by anger, sadness, injured pride, or fear. Feel whether the emotion is hard or prickly in your body. Notice if there's a color field around your mood. Someone told me that his depressed feelings actually feel grayish.

Let go of the story line. At this point, you'll notice that certain thoughts are attached to your particular emotion, thoughts that frequently begin "How could he?" or "I always..." Acknowledge these thoughts and then let them go, keeping your attention on the feeling rather than getting caught up in your personal story line.

Some people ask, "Suppose there is content in my feeling that needs to be dealt with psychologically or practically? Am I supposed to just let it go?" For the moment, yes. For this particular process, it's important to let go of believing the story that your thoughts and feelings are telling you. If you sense that something in these feelings or in the situation that provoked them needs specific action or attention, take note of it! You'll come back to it later on.

Hold the feeling inside your heart until it dissolves into awareness. Consciously bring the feeling-sense of your emotion into your heart. Hold the feeling inside the energy space in your heart. As you do, let your heart space expand, gently and slowly, until you have the sensation that there is real space around your feeling. Now notice what happens inside you, how the energy inside your anger or grief shifts. It might become sharper and more intense for a while, or it might begin to soften around the edges, to become less specific, less prickly or swampy.

It's important to realize that you aren't just trying to make yourself feel better. You are in a process of shifting your perspective about this feeling. Your intention is to explore its energy and to let that energy resolve itself back into its root, into the core energy of every feeling.

When we bring our heavy emotions into our heart space, it is as if we are bringing them into a place where they can be safely cradled. Psychologist Rudy Bauer has a great way of describing this. He says that holding our intense feelings in our consciousness is like holding hot coals in a basket. The basket contains the coals and allows heat to build up so that we can warm ourselves by their fire, but it also keeps the coals from burning us.

In this way, we can harness the energy inside our intense emotions and use it as a vehicle to move beyond our ordinary mind and toward the source, the Self, where we are powered and supported by something much larger than ourselves—something impersonal and yet loving, something that has no content and yet is full of wisdom. Abiding in this place, we understand what Rumi really meant when he said that fighting and peacefulness both take place within God. Whatever the quality of the times we live in, when we know how to enter the energy of intensity, we have discovered a doorway to the infinite.

Sally Kempton is the author of The Heart of Meditation. She also teaches Awakened Heart Meditation workshops. (For a schedule, visit www.sallykempton.com.) 

If you want to read the entire article click here.

More Truth

I'm still contemplating the ramifications of truthfulness as I was discussing in the last post. What if we don't like what we see when we look inside ourselves? Or what if we are so scared to admit that we have value that we cannot look inside ourselves? What do we do then? Well, we keep trying. We use the Yamas & Niyamas to guide us and we practice non-harming (to self and others) and tapas (staying in the heat of the fire, i.e. staying with the discomfort and examining it). And we practice surrender - we go with life instead of fighting all the time.

Here's a little exercise. Ask yourself these questions:

1. What am I most afraid of?

2. If I could do anything at all, no restraints on time and money, what would it be?

3. What do I love most about myself?

Usually the 1st one is pretty hard to answer because most of us have to admit a fault here like, "I'm afraid everyone will see that I am a fraud. I don't really know what I am doing." The 2nd one can get pretty wild, "I'd travel the world, I'd quit my job, I'd learn another language," etc. Now the 3rd one, that's a doozy. How many of us can admit that we like anything about ourselves at all? Much less that we love something about ourselves.

Go ahead, jump in the fire and admit to yourself how many things about yourself are great. I'll start you off, "I love that I laugh a lot, I love that I'm learning to really see myself, I love that I am creative." Go on, keep on making your list.

ps - Here's an article from Yoga Journal to help you along a bit: Polishing the Mirror - the Practice of Self-Reflection.

Seeking the Truth in Yourself

Image from Wikipedia

I recently watched the movie Invictus, a portrayal of Nelson Mandela, acted by Morgan Freeman, set in the 1990's, the time period just after Mandela's release from 27 years of unjust incarceration. Mandela was elected  president by the first truly free election, the first multi-racial democracy, in 1994.

Mahatma Gandhi's non-violent resistance, satyagraha ("truth force"), influenced Mandela's approach to ruling in South Africa. This was portrayed wonderfully in the movie. Mandela's ability to see the truth in himself--his greatness, his flaws, his prejudice, his desire for revenge, his desire for peace--allowed him to rule from a place of equanimity. His ability to look beyond himself and ask, "What is the best course of action for all people of South Africa?" made him an incredible leader.

Since watching this movie I have been wondering what would happen if we could all be so fearless? What would happen if we could all look inside ourselves and see both the greatness and the smallness that makes us who we are? Could we recognize what hooks us if we could see ourselves with perfect truthfulness? Could we find love and forgiveness in our hearts for ourselves and others the way Mandela (and Gandhi) did?

Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti. Peace, peace, peace.

Yamas and Niyamas: Satya

Here's my teacher, Deborah Adele, talking about Truthfulness:



For more information visit the Yamas & Niyamas website.