The practice, the music, the November Challenge!
Kripalu, Lake Mahkeenac, Lenox MA
I’m recently back from 6 days at Kripalu, an absolute luxury and much needed opportunity to experience a retreat for body, mind and soul. Each day brought different gifts, rich experiences, astonishing revelations, challenges and struggles, and if I share them all here with you you’ll be clicking on out of this email in no time, so I will try to distill it.
As I mentioned in my last email blog, I took a Yoga Nidra immersion, and that in itself was a lovely, restorative and renewing practice. I had thought it would give me some additional tools for teaching this nourishing practice, but the truth is that this particular method for teaching Nidra did not align with my own skills and interests as an instructor. Wonderful to be on the receiving end, but I knew pretty quickly that I did not have ambitions to teach a similar style of Nidra. But, more about that another time.
What perhaps had an even more profound effect on me was realizing, around day 2 or so, that what I really wanted out of my time there, all of my time there, was to dive into mindfulness. And, if you are paying attention, Kripalu reminds you constantly that this is available to you. I have been there probably 8 to 10 times since we moved here in 2002. I think in general my intentions in attending workshops have been governed by a driven to-do list of learning, immersing myself, doing, grabbing every possible opportunity to learn. This isn’t a bad thing, but when you are there for a primarily physical workshop, this kind of driven need to push and push can take its toll in achy joints, soreness, injury. Frankly, I cannot roll that way anymore. I don’t enjoy it, the severe deterioration of my genetically problematic shoulders has made that kind of aggressive greed for more and more physical practice untenable, unpleasant, and impossible.
The mindfulness piece taught me this: “Mindfulness” is a big, trendy, and increasingly mainstream word. We generally have good feelings about this word. But, it doesn’t work, as a practice, UNLESS WE PRACTICE!
Simple, I know. But. Just because I think I know what mindfulness is I cannot assume it is automatically a part of my yoga, my relationships, my politics, etc. You have to actually practice mindfulness, to reap its many rewards. So, at Kripalu I practiced. Sitting on a cushion I practiced, walking down the hall I practiced, in asana practice I…practiced. Eating, hiking, in the sauna, I practiced. Bits at a time, I practiced. And by the third or fourth day of my time there I became aware of real, actual, shifts in how I felt. I made everything else less important than the conscious, intermittent practice of mindfulness. I felt a discernible lightening of the daily headache I carry with me. I felt more genuinely centered, patient, happy, pain free, self-loving and compassionate than I have for a long time.
So….if you look at the website you’ll see that I’ve posted a link to a great, free online Mindulfness Summit happening through this month. (Thank you, Yashi, for sending me the link!). It’s a great way hear varied voices on the topic of meditation and mindfulness, as well as some instruction, so I encourage you to check it out. And, inspired by this and my time at Kripalu, I am putting together my own “‘November Challenge” which I hope to flesh out this and next week. For now, look down the page and you will see the idea of “SIT!” outlined.
SIT! The November Mindfulness Challenge
Let’s commit to short, daily meditation during the month of November! I would like to invite everyone to participate in this experiment, to commit to a daily, short, seated (or lying down) meditation practice (5-15 minutes) every day in November. I will put together an email list so I can keep in touch with all who want to take part. Throughout the month of November, I will send a daily, short “prompt” or technique, or intention, or image, for your next day’s meditation, which you can use or not as you like. At the end of November, or beginning of December, I will schedule a group session to share our experiences in a casual, nonjudgmental way, maybe share some snacks, and have a 20 or 30 minute meditation all together in the studio space. This could be a powerful way to transition into deeper Autumn, and to help us feel clear and grounded before the holiday season.
If you are interested contact me and I will start collecting email addresses and/or set up a closed facebook group where we can communicate. If you have suggestions, I would love to hear them.
Where’s the music?
You may be wondering what happened to our music at Upper Valley Yoga. In a nutshell, music licensing agencies are going after yoga studios and requiring the purchase of licenses to play any kind of music during a class. Legally, it counts as a “performance” and somewhere along the way someone realized there was money to be made in going after yoga studios. This has resulted in at least one devastating lawsuit that closed down a studio. Yoga studios do not make much money, because of the cost of skilled instructors, so the additional expense is a significant hit to most of us, especially smaller studios. For a month I received somewhat threatening emails and voicemails daily, and I finally decided, until I figure out how to account for the significant yearly cost of the license (3 of them–there are 3 different agencies) to simply take music out of the equation. For those of you who enjoy music in class, I hope you will bear with me while I try to figure out how to afford it without raising prices at the studio. You could think of it as an opportunity to refine your listening skills around the more subtle music of your own breath
