Do We Really Need More Boundaries?

Photo Credit: Lee Jordon

Recently, I was asked if I felt that yoga was actually (perhaps) an imposition on natural, organic movement. I think it depends. For those super-attuned people who are aware of what feels healing for them based on previous experience or understanding, maybe yoga is an imposition creating boundaries that actually stifle free movement and flow. Maybe.

In my humble experience, the boundaries offered by yoga, specifically the technology of Anusara® yoga, gave me my first taste of freedom and the most interior expansion I’ve ever known. To that point, dear friend and colleague Christina Sell points out, “…when I use the word ‘practice,’ I am not referring only to asana. For me, practice involves an approach to life that is anchored in a commitment to see clearly and to act from that vision. Practice, for me, includes but is not limited to, asana, pranayama, meditation, what I eat, how I eat, why I eat, observing myself, my thoughts, my actions, my reactions, my responses, the cultivation of compassion for myself and others, study, serving, being a friend, a mate, a daughter, a sister and so on.”

All of the aforementioned “practices” are boundaries of a sort. All require observation, a crucial boundary. We must be watching if we are to make progress in our process. We have to be able to SEE what it is that isn’t serving us. When we think we will fail, we do. And to change that pattern, we must first observe that our thoughts are leaning toward failure. Then we can create the conditions for a shift from doubt to gratitude.

Having been taught by Dr. Douglas Brooks that boundaries can be exquisite pathways to a greater freedom, I’ve been looking at what behaviors aren’t working. The highest on my list: rushing. Haste. I’ve been looking at how a boundary refinement of my own needs to happen. And there’s only one that I want to mention here. It helps us all move from haste–in our bodies, minds, and hearts–to a place of much more presence.

It’s called pacing: pacing of my breathing; pacing of the intervals between my thoughts; pacing of my words, my gestures; pacing of the way I stir the agave into my tea. I recently read that to shift a negative state of any kind, we must strive to significantly reduce the speed of whatever it is we’re doing. At this particular moment, I want to be a more patient mama. We can all learn to pace ourselves around our kids and set examples of patience. After seeing time and time again how some ridiculous agenda to do something perfectly is preventing me from listening to my child’s musings on the world, I know this is where I want to improve. I want to  s-l-o-w   d-o-w-n.

The boundary of pacing is key when I’m teaching, listening, spending time with family, friends, students and teachers, traveling or writing. It’s helping me to smooth out the features of my face as well as my gestures. It’s teaching me how to eat more respectfully and receive more nourishment from my food. It’s keeping me healthy by reminding me to go to sleep by 11:00 p.m. instead of 1:00 a.m. It’s making my son so happy to look into my eyes and be heard. It’s bringing me deeper into my backbend practice than ever before and helping me appreciate the significance of simple foundational awareness in all the wildest yoga poses. Because I’m applying this boundary, this awareness of pacing, things are shifting, slowly, organically.

What’s your boundary, and how is it helping you?

Do We Know How to Listen?

The cast at Passover Seder included my dad, mom, brother-in-law, sister and nephew, my son, and my slowly-becoming-best-friend/soon-to-be-ex-husband. As the kids chased one another around the house, my mom began piling up the dishes and my sister provided her usual comedic commentary. Six months ago I’d have found some reason to be fuming mad (I would’ve found something). But in the graceful vulnerability I’ve finally begun welcoming, I found all of it to be observable, hilarious and perfect.

Just as my mom took a break from cleaning to note how wild it was that my ex and I are more committed than most married couples (yet still getting divorced), we leaned in toward one another. I needed to be held up. An excerpt from Ram Dass’ book, Be Here Now, came rushing into my heart: “When you know how to listen, everybody is the guru.”

It was like a dream. Upon remembering this quote, I finally followed my own advice of many years and consciously made the switch: brain off, heart on. In a context that was previously the source of unrealistic unmet expectations, every voice I heard and every sensation I felt became a guide. I had the momentary experience of being completely devoid of my physicality yet more connected than ever before to each person and to every one of my receiving senses. I stayed still, wordless tears fell and something shifted.

That connection was followed by a temporary muting—as though I were underwater—in which I could hear my own breathing, yet all other sounds were silenced. In this quiet, I made contact with some deep reserve of pure presence within myself. Immediately every color in the room became more vivid and I found love in my body the likes of which I’ve felt only in the company of realized beings. “When you know how to listen, everybody [everything] is the guru.”

We will do wonders, literally, if we practice listening. Since I started this practice, listening is making me more patient, more alkaline internally, more hydrated emotionally and more healed in my heart. This kind of complete attention will slow down time for us and erode all of our expectations organically. Instead of veiling our love or our potential wellness with our habitual behavior, we are granted space to receive more nourishment, whatever the static, regardless of the outcome.

The listening that creates the pause in the flow of time has to do with our hearts, not with our minds. The actual practice is to breathe into the back of your heart.

As you read right now, put each inhalation there, behind your heart, within you. With each exhalation, simply soften your gaze, your eyes. There is a quiet fortitude within you awaiting your attention. Keep breathing like this especially when things are the most daunting or frustrating. This listening brings healing.

Are We There Yet?

After graduating from Cornell in 1992 and delving into the textile and clothing design world for more than six years, my supposedly envious life in an apartment overlooking the Po River in Turin, Italy, was not exactly satisfying. I returned to New York to embark on a graduate studies program in Childhood Art Education at the New School. Two semesters in two of the best schools in New York City later, I found myself in Cyndi Lee’s yoga class at Crunch gym in mid-1997, laughing, crying, and knowing I had found a path.

Cyndi’s first teacher training was at the first OM Yoga studio on 14th Street, and I will never stop thanking her. Her style was a revolution for me, and I began teaching at her studio as soon as she’d asked. I met John Friend, founder of Anusara® yoga, in the summer of 2000 and slowly began the long, demanding road to Anusara certification. While on that road I met Dr. Douglas Brooks and Hugo Cory; they have each profoundly influenced the texture of my teaching—helping me to translate the yoga mat into real-life relevance and experiences of grace and gratitude in our daily living.

Recently, about fifteen minutes after receiving word that Kris Carr was interested in my writing (a complete honor), and just seven minutes after watching the Crazy Sexy Cancer trailer for the third time (and weeping, again), a sparkly conversation erupted with a colleague on the subject of “home.”

As a collective, we long to find “home” within ourselves. In my search for home I’ve traversed ashrams, meditation, drugs, seva, chanting, yoga, childbirth, parenthood, teaching, social networking and back. What I’ve found is that our true home is a place of fearlessness in the heart—your heart, my heart, every heart. Furthermore, and much more importantly, home is not some fixed point toward which we aspire; it is steadily expanding state.

So the question remains: Are we there yet? The answer is a resounding YES.

“We need not find our way back home to our divine beginnings; we need only appreciate that wherever we wander in Consciousness we are already where we need to be in order to be fulfilled.” -Dr. Douglas Brooks offered that in a discussion about affirming what already IS. Our yoga practice grounds us, even alkalinizes us, and shifts our vantage point to a place or gratitude, where we can sense that ever-present expansion. There are no fixed stopping points in the poses—if you watch yoga practiced in the Anusara method, you can see that the parameters of the body are always growing.

The only definite is that expansion is always occurring. Now comes the practical question: How do we uphold this expansive awareness in our real-life interactions? How can this fact of eternal, ever-present expansion keep us from contracting within ourselves [and reacting] when we encounter challenging moments during a regular day?

The one-word answer is GRATITUDE. Gratitude is the most expansive attitude we can claim: when we are thankful, we invite levity, more space, more abundance. When we are grateful in a difficult context, we manifest a pause between an occurrence and our reaction to it. With thankfulness, we imprint receptivity on our bodies- we can take in more. With every incident of focused gratitude, we return home to our expanding hearts. Especially when it seems improbable or impossible, use one deep, expansive breath to create the conditions for gratitude to emerge, and you are home.