Ok, so today, I am not feeling too healthy. All of a sudden, sitting here, my throat has a small scratch, my body is feeling a bit weak and part of me just feels like curling up. But the plan is to go to yoga, and I am determined because a part of me knows that it will make me feel better. In fact, sometimes I find it to be a cure all. I feel upset about something, go to yoga. My shoulder hurts, go to yoga. I need to breathe better, go to yoga. I feel like being in a welcoming community, go to Bernal Yoga. In Stephanie Bernstein’s class on Monday nights, she often suggests a couple of things. The first is to smile. Now I am not sure if I have written about this before but smiling makes a big difference. When we smile, the muscles in our face trigger certain synapses in our brain that make us happy. So smiling is great.

The other thing Stephanie often mentions which I find helpful in regards to my desire to go to class today is she often says “thank yourself for coming to class today.” And I think that is very supportive because sometimes it can be very hard to muster up the strength to be committed. So if you went to class, in the rain, under the weather, give yourself a “thank you”, a big one. You deserve it.

Hi.  I’m Jeff and you may have seen me in some of the evening classes.  I’m the old, fat guy with the grey hair and glasses.  I’ve only been doing yoga for a couple of months.  I started with the $25 special, and after two weeks bought a six month membership.  Bernal Yoga is phenomenal, and its not the studio or the location, its all about the people.  The instructors are amazing; they’re really invested in yoga, they know what they’re doing, they’re attentive to their students, they are approachable, and they know how to teach.  My classmates are cool and they are engaged in the pursuit of yoga. The teachers and students also have something in common, they all love to practice yoga.

I remember my first Tuesday class.  It was a Vinyasa Flow class and K.T. Steadman was the instructor.  I was very apprehensive, but everyone made me feel comfortable.  I remember admiring all the people  in the class.  And I promptly forgot all the people about five minutes into the class because I was two minutes (felt like a half-hour) into my first Downward Dog, my shoulders were shaking, my glasses were steamed-up, and sweat was running down my nose.   I’ve lifted weights since 1978, I’ve always been a gym rat, and yoga was kicking my butt.  The great instructors, friendly classmates, and challenge associated with learning yoga have kept me coming back.

I’ve taken Gentle & Restorative Yoga, Vinyasa Flow, Hatha Yoga, Mellow Flow, and Candlelight Flow.  I’ve had several different teachers and even some substitute teachers, and I have not encountered a bad teacher.  I’m mostly amazed at the way they are prepared for each class, smoothly direct each movement throughout the class, and still circle the class helping individual students improve their poses.  This is in every class, and I’ve never seen any teaching like this before (and I’m an educated guy with 3 degrees).  I love the restorative class; I don’t sweat, I get to lay around with my eyes closed, and when I’m done I’m totally relaxed.  During my first Mellow Flow class I was 59 minutes into the class and still trying to figure out when we were going to get to the “mellow” part.  Heather is a great teacher and yoga practitioner.  I told her about a move I’d seen in my new Hatha Yoga book where the guy was in a lotus position, his hands were behind his back, he grabbed his toes on opposing sides, and then bent over and touched his head to the floor.  After class she got into the position.  I was flabbergasted.

I’m finally starting to learn some of the poses.  I’m beginning to understand the relationship between breathing and holding an asana.   After two months I’m starting to do things I haven’t been able to do for the last 25 years.  When I started I couldn’t grab the outside of my feet for Happy Baby,…now I can.  The other night in Tracy Joe’s class I was in Downward Dog and actually relaxing.  I still can’t complete the move from Downward Dog to a lunge (I’m too fat) and every time I try the Tree someone should yell “timber.”  But I have seen gradual growth in my abilities and understand the interrelationship of my breathing with each move I make in class.  And now my favorite yoga ensemble is Downward Dog to Plank to Upward Dog and back to Downward Dog because I understand how to breath for each of the movements.  I’ll probably never be a yoga teacher, and in my previous athletic endeavors I’ve never surpassed mediocre, but I do love yoga and hope to continue practicing for the next twenty years. Later.

One of the first students that ever came to Bernal Yoga was a woman named Judy Garlow, who at the age of 58 was also probably the oldest student at the time. Judy had red hair and a black Jade yoga mat with her name written in silver across the top. She was as regular in the Saturday morning Yoga Basics for years. Always one of the first people there and usually quietly out the door at the end. I never knew really knew who she was or too much about her until years later. We just thought Judy was the nicest lady and how great that she practiced yoga every week like that.

Our bonding moment came unexpectedly next to each other in line at the Good Life Grocery. “The Steelers are on Monday Night Football.” I explained nodding to the Sierra Nevada on the scanner breaking the silence. “That’s ok”,she whispered leaning in to fill me in on a secret. “I like to treat myself to a Burger King Whopper after Savonn’s Saturday class sometimes.” Now that’s something you typically don’t hear from yoga students. But Judy grew up in a different era and if anything, her honesty was refreshing.

The Saturday morning Yoga Basics class that Judy came to eventually changed when Savonn moved to Portland. As what happens with all classes when the teacher leaves, the class eventually evolves.

I took over and Judy stuck with it, which was great. The class got a little bit harder and the people started changing around her, but she had her routine and knew her limitations so she was doing fine until one day we noticed Judy wasn’t there, then a few weeks went by and still no Judy. Several weeks later Judy came back a much different person. Judy was diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer.

We watched her health decline rapidly from week to week. I started to get concerned as she often became disoriented in class. She would mistakenly sit on the yoga mat next to hers or have a hard time finding her footing leaving the studio.

When the decision was made that she should only take Restorative or Gentle Yoga classes with the support of a friend she told us “the Saturday class is the only thing that makes me feel good, like I’m normal and this is not happening to me right now.”
How do you deny someone the right to practice yoga when all they want to do is come to feel “normal”? You don’t.

As much as our decision to try and limit her practice was for her personal safety, we couldn’t refuse her desire to be there for the sake of being there. And so began my journey of watching a student rapidly lose her battle with cancer week by week.

It was a courageous effort on Judy’s part to just come. There was nothing much besides a few seated poses that she could really do and everywhere all around her, healthy people happily stretched and practiced. Yet there she was.

Judy made it to about six more classes after that. Her last class, she fell face-first down onto the ground from a standing forward fold. I had watched this fall happen many times in my dreams only in reality thankfully, she didn’t die like in my visions. Fortunately, she was not seriously injured in the fall and happened to have a licensed RN practicing next her who stabilized her enough to get her to lean against the wall for the remainder of the class. Afterwards it took nearly 30 minutes to get her from the studio out to her ride. There was no denying that this would be the last class.

I saw her one more time when I went to visit her at home the last week in Hospice care. She died a few days later on June, 3rd 2007. There is a bench at the top of Holly Park near her home in San Francisco honoring her life.

This post is dedicated to Judy, my mom who has fought brain cancer and is currently cancer free and to the many yoga students who drag or have drug themselves to class in the middle of chemotherapy hell and have the strongest and most focused practice imaginable. Thanks for the lessons in courage.

About Judy:
Judy Garlow was a longtime director of the State Bar program to fund legal services for the poor in California. After the federal government cut legal aid funding in the 1980s, she got involved in a new program to help subsidize the programs, which offer free lawyers or legal advice to low-income people in areas such as housing, welfare and domestic violence.

Yesterday and today, I find myself taking lots and lots of deep breaths. It’s not that I am sighing, just breathing mindfully. Taking in a breath, feeling it fill my chest, go deep into my belly and then slowly letting the air out. It started at the end of the day yesterday and it seems to be sticking. It wasn’t mindful at first, I just seemed to need it suddenly. And now that I think about it, I am remembering how in class the other day, we were asked to breathe deeply: breathe in, one, two, three, four, five six, retain, let it out, one, two, three, four, five, six. Repeat.

It’s amazing how breathing has a deep, calming effect. I suddenly feel relaxed and alive and present and not caught up in worries about work or life or whatever else might come in the way. It also offers a real sense of feeling your body, your cells, your muscles, even the synapses in your brain.

And yoga does this, we feel our bodies, we feel its “hows” (to quote ee cummings), we feel where we’re blocked and where we’re open and we can feel this in a pose or we can feel it by the simple, rhythmic, consistent, fundamental, reliable act of breathing.

So today, just breathe, and breathe deep. Breathe in the rain and the air, breathe in strength and support, breathe in life, just breathe. You’ll be amazed at how grounding it can be. I sure am.

We all know that moment where we think, “I can’t do this anymore”, “ok, I have reached my threshold”, “why do I come here anyways, to experience this suffering, I mean what’s the point?”. We feel the burn, so to speak, and we just want to fall to the ground and lay there, skipping all the asanas and getting right into the final resting pose, Shivasana. But it’s not about feeling the burn, or not feeling the burn, it’s about watching how you react when the burn comes. Because we feel the burn in all different parts of our life. We feel it when we’re struggling with work, we feel it when we might be frustrated with something in ourselves, when we’re trying to understand the deeper relationships in our life. Burn is part of life, and a wonderful part of it in fact because it sheds light on the smoother and more fluid parts of our day to day.

So when we do feel the burn, be it in asanas or in our own practice of daily living, do we run away, give up, escape, get angry or do we go deeper, really get a sense of what the burn feels like, see how much we can learn from it, where it actually is coming from and, as one teacher at Bernal reminds us to do, smile through it. When someone suggests you smile during a particularly hard Warrior One it doesn’t sound very appealing but it actually helps. It breaks down the fear and frustration, but even more importantly, it stimulates certain synapses in your brain which are hard wired for happiness.

So when the burn comes on, and it almost always does, watch closely. First, look at your immediate reaction. Then, try and break the burn down into various senses. Rather than saying, “this is so hard”, think of all the ways it’s challenging you by trying to understand it muscle by muscle (pulsing, throbbing, shaking). See how your understanding can become a reflection of how you react to other challenges in life. By looking at that, you can then learn something about yourself. And then…smile.

….I know, it’s an oxymoron. The computer seems antithetical to practice. But for those of us who do have jobs that keep us on the computer all day (pretty much), we can take an opportunity to practice almost all day long.

First of all: breathe. OK, one of the basic parts of practice and we can do it just by sitting here. Maybe write yourself a little note and stick it on your wall, on your screen, send yourself a daily e.mail. Breathe. Take a deep breath. Skype asks you to do just that when it first opens up and I love that because I am reminded that I am a body sitting in front of this machine, not just a mind.

Next, open up your chest. There are so many postures where we have to have an open chest: Pigeon, spinal twists, upward facing dog, warrior one. Open that chest up. Give some space for your belly to move, your ribs to expand.

Finally, get those shoulders down the back, freeing up the neck. One of the places many of us hold tension is in our neck. By pushing the shoulders back and down, we open up some space for tension to flow and be released rather then getting all caught up…

There are many chances to practice off the mat but maybe one of the most important times is at work, at your desk, when you’re getting deeply involved in your head. Getting into your body as well can help you work better and be more effective all around!

It is rare that we focus on one pose in class, at least consciously. Since many of the classes at Bernal are flow classes, each pose does lead to another and many poses may be part of each other (I can’t think of a good example of this right now but you know what I mean). This past Saturday however, Debbie Zambetti had us focus on Kapotasana (pigeon pose), a pose that is a favorite to many. I remember one of my first pigeons years ago. Opening my hip like that felt absolutely amazing and, looking back, I am sure I could have used a few adjustments. When you take a class to focus on the various components of one asana, it offers a chance to really get to know the pose and get a sense of what feels right. It also offers a chance to see where you tend to go in a pose and how immediately you tend to fall into patterns. In class, we did three pigeons and almost everytime, I leaned down to place my head on the floor but Debbie’s direction was to open up the chest, be a proud pigeon, get a back bend in there. It was on the third one that we got to go down and get into the pose in the way we’re normally accustomed to. It was wonderful but having had the previous variations made the pose that much richer. Each asana is so complex, I sometimes wonder what it would be like to spend each class, for a week, going through some of the key poses: a whole class on Parsvakonasana (extended side angle), a whole class on Uttanasana (forward bend), and maybe even one on Shivasana (corpse pose).

It’s an important question. Why do we come? With all the things we can do with our time, why this? That question is raised every time I walk into the studio, why am I here and what do I intend to do with my time in this class? Some of you may be saying, wait, you spoke about this a few postings ago when speaking about devotion. But this is slightly different. This isn’t about what are we devoted to, it’s about why we are devoted to yoga. For me personally, it’s not about getting more physical. It’s about using the physicality of yoga to free some part of myself, to look closer at the things that challenge me, to gain a better understanding of why I want to get out of a pose, to see how I might criticize myself when I can’t get into tree pose or wonder if my shirt could be cuter in class (yes, I actually do think about that). I come to yoga to get free from that which constrains me and somehow these poses do that. They are freeing in some way. They open up something inside and let it out. They show me how breath, that simple, consistent action, the marker of life, is the path to going deeper. Notice how when you breathe, you break boundaries. That’s why I come. But why do you come? I think the more you realize and stay focused on that, the closer you can get to getting there and ultimately achieving it, whatever it may be.

For the first time yesterday, after an evening class, I noticed how the days are getting shorter. It was dark in the studio, well almost dark, and while the air was wondrously warm outside, the planets and stars were peaking out just a little bit earlier. In that stillness, Shivasana, the quiet brought on by the light, I was reminded once again of the vital importance of slowing down. Slowing down does not necessarily mean doing less, it just means being aware of what it is you are doing. Slowing down means that when you’re in Tricanasana, you’re not thinking about what is coming next. Slowing down means breathing. Slowing down means taking a seat.

Yesterday in class, Stephanie spoke about how asana means “pose” but it also means “seat”. So when we’re in an asana, we’re actually taking a seat, slowing down into a position, albeit sometimes quite an uncomfortable position. So it would behoove us to take each asana one by one, seat by seat, almost as if we’re sitting down for a brief conversation, one with our bodies, about how something feels, where we can go further, what direction we can take.

The light, the seasons and the air is asking us to take it easy, slow down, and pay closer attention. Yoga affords us the opportunity to do just that…

I live in San Francisco so I try to take advantage of many of the things this city offers: affordable acupuncture, yoga, walks in the park, meditation classes. A few weeks ago, my meditation teacher spoke about how preoccupied we have become with being busy, with having full schedules, with running around and how, in certain ways, busy has become part of our identity. Yoga is a way to slow down a bit but even on the mat, we tend to want to get a lot in. Sadly, in the process, we sometimes lose some quality and, particularly with asanas, it’s important to remain focused and not rush.

In the last two posts, I have explored the minutiae of some of our most common poses. Yesterday, when thinking about what I wanted to write, I was in Trikonasana and even there, I was thinking about rolling my upper thigh out, straightening my arms, keeping my back leg active, grounding my front foot, breathing, looking at one spot, breathing and I thought how great it would be to just focus on that one pose, again and again and again. Rather than try and get through a whole bunch of poses, why not focus on one or two or three and do them well.

Yoga is practice. There is a lot to it but practice is key. We must do things again and again to get our muscles to remember the poses. The more muscle memory we build, the more fluid asanas become and then practice has that flow.

So less IS more. You don’t have to get in a load of asanas to practice, you just have to slow down, breathe and do what works for you, and do it well. There is nothing to prove on the mat, it’s a time to just be with the breath and the body, fully, from our toes to our tailbones to the crown of our heads.