Not Seeking

Namas/te--”Bow”(“salutations,” “greetings”)/[to]You”

RATHER THAN SIMPLY “Hello,” namaste aspires to acknowledge a deeper reality of inseparability:

The light in me bows to the light in you, 

and when we come together in that light we are one.

BECAUSE WE ACKNOWLEDGE this oneness, our bows can activate “not seeking” as our forward moving action.  Since we are one, the need to seek something is challenged.  “Not seeking” deeply expresses and actualizes the niyama of santosha or “contentment.”  We are deeply content right now in this moment with no need or fundamental benefit to seek more.  Psycho-spiritually, not seeking generates the foundational experience of calmness that can flower into deeper experiences of tranquility and harmony and grace.

When we physically or mentally bow to each other or to the flower or to the water, the action can express even more than insight of oneness and be an action step: We are not seeking.  This is deep yoga of insight and action that is quite different from a more facile yoga as sequences of poses with a bow as hello or respect.  And this is not exclusive to yoga, but rather is a more universal deep body-mind-spirit practice.  

Breath & Kindness

YOGA CAN BE fitness-oriented, which tends to imply a workout and favor a strength-orientation.  Poses are isometric contractions, and the main benefit of isometric contraction is strength.  Yoga can become a way to increase strength without weights or gym equipment.  Poses may be dominated by postures that work muscles and ligaments to the point of discomfort that provokes the thought of getting out of the pose.  In this approach, breath is engaged to press through the discomfort--sort of pain equals gain, and specific breath techniques are utilized as a way to press though the “edge.”  In everyday life, strength is posited to offer a functional sense of both physical and psychological/emotional stability.  Psychologically, this approach is posited to bolster up coping skills to overcome mental stress and obstacles.

The strength/stability-oriented approach is likely the most widespread strategy and tends to be some form of “vinyasa flow.”  And yet, people commonly report being drawn to yoga initially to deal with “stiffness,” which is typically defined as inflexibility, often to the point of aches and pains when moving.  A strength-oriented approach tends to exaggerate aches and pains.  Its isometric contraction emphasis brings the poses to the point of discomfort, and this discomfort when “stiff” is more intense.  It is “push” more than “release.”  And fitness in general can increase inflexibility.  The typical facilitator response is to suggest that repeated practice will be easier and, at best and, for the moment, the pose can be modified to reduce discomfort.  Discomfort is posited to be a given and necessary for strength.  The other option is to find a more “gentle” class where the same approach is likely to continue at a slower pace, but still with a strength-orientation in repeated poses such as warrior variations and forward fold variations.  This leads to many “newbies” dropping out of yoga practice.

A flexibility-oriented practice in modern practice is still fitness-oriented, but may be more wellness oriented in that it places a strong emphasis on cognitive awareness rather than upon physical exercise.  Whether gentle or more challenging, poses are slowed down with the idea of producing little discomfort.  And breath is not used to push through discomfort.  The primary work in the pose is one of releasing rather than pushing.  Since the goal is flexibility, nerves need to relax--i.e., spindles in muscle and fascia need to release--because nerves drive tissue to either contract or release.  Breath tends to be natural rather than intensified or metered into a pace.  Breath expands for both support and massage of not only muscles and ligaments but also organs, nerves, lymphatic tissue and so forth.  Breath washes awareness. When “yoga-quitting” poses such as standing and seated forward folds are utilized, knees are bent, not simply to make the pose gentler, but primarily to stretch areas such as the lumbar and “lats,” and to allow comfortable slow holding of the poses.  As the nerve spindles release and the current pose is comfortable, legs might be gradually straightened by gradually unbending knees, further stretching the tissue.  This slow process gradually releases facia that may be the last to release (and which s missed when going faster or when pushing the pose and increasing discomfort).  “Softness” and suppleness of the total body-mind become emphases.

A flexibility-oriented practice can emphasize more than fitness.  It can emphasize stillness and slow movement as a means of provoking experiences such as calmness that can, in turn, deepen into experiences such as tranquility, harmony, and grace.  Calmness and these more complex emotional states are commonly described as qualities of spiritual persons.  In human life, these states of being can become more regular characteristics or “attributes.”   Here the practice becomes neither simply body fitness nor body-mind wellness, but rather body-mind-spirit.  Breath here and listening to body experience and the passing thought-stream become quite different.  Breath here is relaxed and “kind.”    Poses can be gentle, gentle restorative, gentle, or even Level 1 and Level 2 and still be kind and painless.   Poses can then become “islands of grace”  that are not rigid but that softly open.  A sense of thriving and optimizing and even positive “dis-identification with ego” (i.e., transpersonality or self-Identity expanded beyond ego) can occur.  Such an emphasis begins to actualize that which yoga aspired for millennia to experience, having almost nothing to do with poses (excepting a few meditative postures).

Release Vs. Stretch

“STRETCH” TENDS TO IMPLY “push,” and “release” tends to imply “let go.”  “Stretch” could reference release, but what is commonly observed is pushing.  Muscles seem restricted, and so the task becomes stretching to make them less restricted.  But with a “push” orientation, that which becomes restricted for most people is engagement in a process to reduce general “stiffness.”

We habituate muscles and ligaments to limited positions for most of the day.  Then nerves “tell” muscles that this is their safe range, and they fire registering discomfort when we exceed this habituated range.  This resistance is their adaptive or functional role to keep tissue from either being injured or decreasing its elasticity. 

If we want a “new normal” that helps with both functionality in everyday life and a body that does not impede mind, we need to be more realistic about what we are trying to do.  We need to let go more than push, because the task is not to “push” or stretch tissue, but rather “let go” or release nerves to then release muscles and fascia to a fuller normal range.  The “new normal” does not involve making tissue such as muscle and ligaments longer. These tissues are attached at fixed points in the bone so the entire muscle complex cannot get longer.  Quadriceps femoris in the upper leg and soleus beneath the achilles tendon tighten so that heels cannot reach the mat and squats are no longer comfortable.  But in Asia, where the norm has been a habitual squat, squats can be comfortable.  For many in Asia, the tissue is not hyper-extended; it is at full normal range.

First, what must change is nerves.  Nerves must be retrained to fire less at deeper levels of poses—“stretch tolerance.”  Gently holding easy positions and then gradually extending muscles and fascia and following the body rather than pushing/controlling allows nerves to gradually tolerate the change to a “new normal.”

And second we need to be persistent or “repeat” poses.  Practice does not make muscles and fascia permanently longer.  The habituated positions win out across the long run.  To relax nerves and to enjoy this process, we need to release more than push—“frequency more than intensity,” “no pain—gain.”

Not working with muscle and fascia results in habitual limited positions that we all know too well.  Shoulders get “stiff” and even painful, and do not lift high overhead or bend sideways.  However, if we habitually “push,” we may also promote an often overlooked dysfunction.  If we push muscles/fascia rather than relax nerves, we can get stronger response for things like sports performance (i.e., jump higher or get speed bursts), but we are also likely to tighten rather than release muscles, and across time this can feel like injury because it can be so limiting.  And if we push to extend muscles and fascia, we can chronically irritate areas or even reduce the elasticity of the tissue (reducing its ability to contract effectively when needed).

Restorative yoga can be an important core practice for a “new normal” that can then be extended into more active poses.  It flips the switch from push to let go, from control to follow, from fast to slow.

The poses are not really “passive.”  As a person relaxes, spindles [micro nerves in tissue] release and the tissue extends (or as Vanda Scaravelli suggests, allowing the pose to come to you).  And spending time in a pose, a person can also gently flow back and forth in a cycle of gentle extension and retraction.

Release can be experienced as “mental release” as well.  First, this sense of mental release rather than push is pleasurable, and this can draw a person to this practice so that the frequency of practice is increased as well as the length of time spent in each practice session.  Second, this calming and quieting in mental release has both optimizing holistic physiological effects that may be more important cross the long run than reducing stiffness as well as transforming imagination from chatter to intuition and insight.  The “workout” or “exercise” becomes a deeper body-mind-spirit practice.

Overall, the strategy emphasizes the growing realization that tissue doesn’t change, nerves change.

And most important, what was not enjoyable becomes pleasurable.

“Relaxing nerves” becomes synonymous with release.  And terms such as “slow-cooking,” gently hanging out in poses, slow stretching, following, flowing and pushing in cycles of extension and retraction, spindle release, frequency more than intensity, no pain—gain, and stretch tolerance become terms that form a practice of releasing. 

Relaxing Nerves: A “Revolutionary” Vision

WE IMAGINE RELAXING muscles and fascia, but relaxing releases nerve responses, that then relax muscle and fascia.  The first act—the “egg”—might be the nerves, and the “chicken”—second, the muscles and fascia.

When we push muscles and ligaments, emphasizing strength, balance or quick transitions, it is difficult to imagine how we do not excite nerves rather than relax nerves (as well as provoke other agitated chemistry that comes to us mentally and in lessened sport performance in a burn of lactic acid buildup).

Pushing muscles and ligaments does have an effect.  It is the core of the physicality of much of the 20^th Century yoga out of India into the West.  But as yoga poses mature with a strong nod to “flexibility” (really, still a “fitness” term), perhaps a revolutionary leap out of a fitness mindset shift to, perhaps, a “suppleness” mindset that attends not only to muscles and ligaments, but also to the fascial structure of muscles, ligaments, sheets of fascia, organs and on-and-on ad infinitum.  

Having been “physical” most of my life, there are other approaches worth consideration, involving, for example, a new language of “wellness,” (that is still quite heavily laden with “fitness” strategies) and then, “optimal health/thriving” that is still in an embryonic state and in need of new terminology. 

Let’s imagine, for a moment, not pushing muscles and fascia, but rather, trying to do the opposite.  Under anesthesia, muscles and ligaments are experienced to become pliant/flexible to the point of bones being capable of dislocation.  It’s not the muscle and ligament action that is doing this.  It is the nerve channels.  The nerves in anesthesia are, metaphorically speaking, “turned either down or off.”

We can use this fact in deep stretching.  Rather than “push to an edge to drive out pain (“no pain, no gain”), we might just relax and “stretch” (inducing no pain, gain).  Rather than exciting nerves to the point of discomfort, we might use whatever we have to use [blocks, blankets, pillows, bolsters] to support and open to then follow the release of spindles—micro-coils of nerve tissue in muscles and (under another name) in fascia. 

Something new here: “spindles,” and how they operate.

And then, given spindles, something new here because of how spindles function:

Our focus on muscles and ligaments and sheets of fascia that we push to stretch might dramatically shift to something new—to a focus on nerves as the real interface. 

In shifting the focus to nerves, we might aspire to relax them rather than excite and agitate them.

Go to any gym in the world, and note how little time is spent stretching.  In the hyper-flexibility gyms of acrobatics especially in rigid nation-states, find workouts next to torture (usually of the most flexible youth, which they endure to basically survive).  Many people are  engaged in “yoga,” but many more are turned away after their first session by a fitness strategy that suggests to them that when in pain, keep going and it will eventually go away. 

For the average person, stretching takes them back to gym class where stretching was the key agony of gym class.  “Stretching” back then and still now means hurting until you decide to quit, and it is far less enjoyable than the hardest physical workout. 

But what if you could do some aerobics for “cardio” somewhere in the plan, and then spend some real time, not minutes, stretching WITH THE SENSE THAT THIS TIME WOULD BE ENJOYABLE?   In this process, THE STRETCH MIGHT BE GRADUAL.  And this process would REQUIRE that the pose be comfortable/enjoyable.  And for purpose?  To calm the nerves to promote the release of spindles.   And what is the purpose of that?  

Without analyzing an outcome, stretching for a time would naturally “deepen,” which is to say, the pose would continue to change, wherein the body “softens” rather than tenses.  Such a pose would occur across a small span of time or “come to us” across a small span of time (after Vanda Scaravelli) rather than be something static that we assume and hold.

So perhaps, not muscles or ligaments, but nerves, …and relax.

See additional posts in Islands Of Grace:

Holding Poses & Spindle Release 2/18/12

Releasing Vs. Conditioning 6/9/15

Soft 3/20/15

Allow The Pose To Come To You 12/3/13

Aruksita Yoga—The Supple Body 11/27/13

Suppleness 9/3/13

Slow Cookin’ 6/6/13

Stretch & Relax 10/2/12

Audio tapes of Restorative-Yin Yoga 90 Minute Sessions 2014

I have 4 tapes of sessions, but only available on something like flash drive as it is too much for a  CD or email.

Releasing Vs. Conditioning

Restorative yoga can be primarily about “release” as a core directive. 

The most widespread contemporary, popular yoga that fills the room can be more about “conditioning” as a core directive.

Most participants of mainstream yoga seek and enjoy conditioning qualities.  Slow down a lot and folks are likely to get up and walk out of the practice, angry.  Popular yoga is typically associated with fitness, which seems to be an obvious reason for doing yoga, with “yoga fitness” being more oriented toward flexibility and mental challenge that is intriguing.  If new to popular yoga, one is likely to be sore the next day due to being “out of condition”—revealing the condition aspect. 

If one is new to restorative yoga, one is likely to not be sore the next day.

When closest to its essence or “heart practice,” restorative yoga is release.  Every acion is quiet, calm, eased, relaxed.  Slow flowing body actions amplify relaxation.  Desensitization (through perhaps lowered light, supports, blankets, fragrance and soft music) amplifies relaxation.  Physiologically, that which relaxes is the nervous system in body tissue—organs, vessels, ligaments and muscles.  Physiologically, restorative yoga can relax nerves that are the primary controllers of muscles and ligaments.  Nerves control the degree of relaxation as is demonstrated in anesthesia where surgeons need to be careful not to dislocate joints due to markedly increased muscle flex with nerves “turned off.”

For most, the controlled stress on body and mind is the main point.  To release stress, the focus becomes short-term stress.  The release of stress is irrelevant and experiences that the end of practice.  For most, the “lazed, everyday modern body” needs the stress and short-term stress is good.  And it is good in many ways.  Working one’s ass off is very good for many things.  Perhaps with ass-working, one can even accomplish “scorpion” or perhaps “firefly” or “Marichyasana IV” or a raging back bend.  Not a bad thing, really, fee or free, but not “releasing.”

Restorative yoga can offer a heart-yoga practice, or, perhaps, not “yoga” at all. 

At any rate, there is a particular philosophy of care in “Restorative,” that can be expanded to all asanas, so that all asanas can become “islands of grace”  (as in “soft power yoga, described elsewhere in previous Islands Of Grace blog posts).

Here the philosophy of care is grounded in “kindness yoga”—yoga metta—and Vanda Scaravelli’s notions of freeing the body, following the poses, no system, listening, body awareness of especially that body part that is taut or “lit-up,” etc. …

Again, why “releasing”?  

My query into the idea of releasing came from just a few secondary words mentioned by a N. California yoga teacher at a place on Point Reyes called Commonweal [featured on Bill Moyer’s Healing & The Mind many years past] who said that it was central to yoga.  For a few years, no yoga teacher seemed to have a clue what I was asking about.  Then there was the mention of the possibility of touching it in “restorative yoga” and/or in “yin yoga.”  I think I was drawn to this idea due to more than half a century now of practicing martial “aiki” that seemed to have most of the “releasing ideas” as their deepest practice.

Into The Gaps

IN A PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK, Annie Dillard writes,

The gaps are the thing.  The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes

and latitudes so dazzling spare and clean that the spirit can discover

itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound.

In body-mind practices, one crosses a threshold from the everyday into a different order.  There is a combination of an asceticism of a discipline as well as affection for the practice that can transport the participant out of the ordinary.   The world is the same one,  but the view is deeper, inseparable.

            In studios, dojos and dojangs, in kivas and temples, and in small rooms and wild, unbuilt spaces, there is the possibility for something transcendent and enduring and timeless.

Body-mind practices have likely endured because they can offer an accessible “gap” in the world, so that the gap doesn’t have to be far off.  We tend to make “far off” and “special,” and tend to miss the richness that is present without taking one step.   Stepping through the doorway, it can be as if one has slipped inside a gap in the everyday.  The space can be sacral rather than mundane. 

There might be a deeper sense of one’s authenticity—inclusive, even inseparable, and a letting go—dis-identification, and observation more than control, where ego might be set aside and inside/outside soften. Sameness and difference fade.  Thought and action aspire to coming into harmony or balance.

There is calmness inherent not only in moments of physically slowing and stilling but also in a return to the reliability of repetitive actions.  By returns, actions might be followed, perhaps becoming graced even if not athletically graceful, and implicitly meaningful without needing to offer explicit meaning.

*****

AT THE SAME time, this quality that Annie Dillard writes of may be largely absent in body-mind practices.  Across time, body-mind practices vacillate between the practical and the spiritual, and reformation efforts arise to take them by varying degrees one way or the other.  Contemporary practices termed “yoga” are resplendent with a broad continuum of approaches. 

We tend to become our words. The core language of approaches may be quite different.  Effort might be directed toward strengthening ego rather than softening ego—“knowing oneself” by pushing physical limits and overcoming weakness to go “deeper inside.”  There may be no sense of gap in the everyday to be found.  Rather than stepping out fo the everyday, the real task might be identified as intensifying the everyday to extract the very best from it.  Everyday “work” might carry forward into a “workout.”