Allow The Asana To Come To You

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WHEN YOU BEGIN YOGA, the process may appear to be one of bringing yourself to a pose, to something that is seems standardized into a goal.  You might try to shape yourself to a pose, and you always find room for improvement.  And then you flow to another pose and then another.

But when you begin to hold poses, the process may begin to change.  Spindles in muscles and connective tissue begin to release, AND, more important, a switch has been flipped in the parasympathetic nervous system that triggers profound changes in the various internal systems of the body physiology that are not present when moving faster.  And this physiology that you can only generally sense as relaxation can open an unexpected gateway.

Should you begin to routinely hold poses, rather than rarely, you might experience a sense of the possibility of the pose coming to you rather than bringing yourself to it.  This shift is a revolutionary one in yoga.  And yet, it is also likely an eternal one, not caught up in the popular moment or a specific agenda.

Allowing the pose to come to you is one critical component of a revolutionary yoga.  The nature of poses (asanas) is revisioned.  Then yoga is not about a technique or a “pose,” or a correct sequence of poses, and not even about being “aligned” or “doing it right.”   Then, there are no real systems or styles of yoga.

Allowing the pose to come to you is immediately different from flowing from one pose to the other.  In flow, you can attune to the points of tension and release, but you move toward modeling a pose.  In flow, even slow, there is little time to really listen.  The image is gross [in a benevolent sense], not detailed.

So how to begin to allow the pose to come to you? 

Allowing the pose to come to you takes time, takes holding, quieting, attuning. 

Then, having taken this small revolutionary turn by holding and attuning, think (1) “free the body not controlling it,” and (2) simply, “allow the pose to come to me.”

Allowing the pose to come to you likely begins where the hands touch and/or the knees touch or the back-body grounds.  You don’t simply go to the pose.   Your knees, your hands, your back: What are they asking, or have you allowed them to become very secondary or forgotten in a rush to “get to the pose.”

Then the pose grows like a planted seed, small at first, pressing then yielding.  Your form may look quite different from someone else.  And this difference is optimal; it is authentic, in the sense that it is fitted to you.  And across returns to practice, the pose changes, flowers differently, and at various points, quite unexpectedly leads somewhere else.

As a plant is optimized when it is nurtured, so must a pose be nurtured to be optimized.  

ARUKSITA YOGA—The Supple Body

NOT HARD, diamond-like yoga, not pain’s edge for gain, not core development, not fitness, not a "workout"

Rather, aruksita (supple), pliant, no pain gain, like a yielding water reed, accepting/receiving/opening, giving oneself over

Not really even flexibility, but rather, softness

Muscles and joints, yes; but as secondary focus, too simple, facile, not really near the heart of the matter

Opening the flow of the inner body

Freeing not controlling

Yoga Metta, kindness yoga

See also Islands Of Grace September 3, 2013 post: "Suppleness"

Restorative Yoga Practice In Des Moines

ekagrayoga.com

Lance Kinseth offering RESTORATIVE-YIN YOGA practice, Wednesdays 10:30-Noon, Unity Church, 414 31st Street, Des Moines, Iowa, beginning 12/4/2013.

RESTORATIVE-YIN YOGA involves supported body/mind relaxation.  This is gentle, gentle yoga that promotes deep relaxation for stress reduction while also stretching and rehabilitating connective tissue.

The quiet and calm poses of restorative-yin yoga offer islands of grace.

See Islands Of Grace blog that is followed globally: 

http://santosharestorative-yinyogajournal.blogspot.com

A Mind Like Compost

Lance Kinseth, 2007

            On Top

All this new stuff goes on top

turn it over     turn it over

wait     and water down.

From the dark bottom

turn it out

let it spread through, silt down,

even.

Watch it sprout.

A mind like compost.

IN AXE HANDLES, poet Gary Snyder describes an Earthen process that can also be a high mental process.  This mental process can be optimized by the intention to calm and quiet and slow that is central in body mind practices such as restorative yoga.  The barrage of moment-to-moment stimuli that is “on top” is not really the heart of the matter.  Stilling, turning it over, inviting it to spread throughout, to silt down, entering and opening the depths, then recreating, creating, transforming.

Listening Point

Lance Kinseth, 2011

LISTENING, NOT KNOWING: Everything that we “know for sure” is subject to be radically overturned.  The very nature of the universe(s?) will remain beyond our capacity to ever sense.

And in everyday life, everything that we might experience as constant, wondrous or even static and boring, is a stream of change. Even across the time span of a few months, personal, societal and environmental consequences will occur that we cannot foresee.  Commonality is a measure of our limits rather than life at it is.

How to live in such uncertainty? 

Listening, remaining alert to the changing conditions of existence, is the core of a wild state that optimizes the sustainability of each species. 

With senses pulled in many directions at once, coming to a listening point may optimize alertness.  Overall, this action offers to reduce the sensory overload so that we might not overlook resources and actions that are optimal.

This listening point centers us just enough to come inside our experience rather than just look at it or, most of the time, overlook it.   We then stand to not finally know, but rather, to invite and to listen to that which appears, we optimize in our general capacity to connect, and we just might improve our capacity to come into harmony, integrate and adapt and transform.

Body-mind practices often arise to essentially create a listening point.  Rather than being just a borrowing or an age-old way from modern “exercise” or “stress reduction,” such practices can provide a listening point that steps out of the everyday for at least moments if not more.  Many moments of body-mind practice or “repetition” may flower into awareness of increasing integration with events that had, heretofore, seemed separate and unimportant.  Then, subtlety and grace become visible in the movements and poses of practices such as tai chi, qigong, meditation, and very gentle yoga.  And if they are authentically subtle and graced, there is much more going on with everyday activities such as work and cooking and cleaning and relationships to others and to landscape.

Perhaps the crucial element of body-mind practice involves cutting through the chatter of the continual rain of sensory stimuli and thought.  Slowing to stillness and calmness optimizes this process.  And, paradoxically, doing less, a switch is flipped, and a profound acuity and physiological action might be triggered that optimizes a listening point.

Body-mind practices tend to cut through routine and place each of us at a center point of sorts, an “in-between.” On a very basic level, each inhale might penetrate inside us, and each exhale connects or integrates and expands into our experience. In the body-mind practice of gentle yoga, when we cross a threshold from the everyday to the mat, to the place of practice—our initial stilling of the body-mind, perhaps followed by breath work, takes us out of the chatter of discriminating self into being-ness.  Rather than self and other, we might shift to Being-ness & Cosmos.  Then, each breath is more that “air.”  It extends into the infinity of cosmos.  We might go both inward and outward.  There is a listening point, a center point and this point is a prayer of sorts, a call inviting something deep that we literally need and should not be ashamed to seek, rather than exercise or stress release.

A Hidden Intensity In Restorative-Yin Yoga

Lance Kinseth, 2013

A VERY EARLY Islands of Grace Post  [3/3/2011] sketches a restorative-yin yoga sequence.  But just doing the poses may still mask an essence that is occurring in the sequences.  And understanding this essence can be a meta-motivator to regularly do this type of practice.

At the end of such a sequence, there is likely to be a feeling of deep relaxation.  But it might be interpreted as the result of simply doing less—almost “nothing”—rather than doing something.  And this “doing nothing” seems to have its primary benefit as passive stress relief.

One of the missing aspects in describing the poses in the sequence is the absence of the sensory experience of “flipping a switch” in human physiology.  A pratitoner may experience as sense of relaxation and calmness but may miss a hidden intensity in this practice.

If done appropriately, “doing nothing” actually does a lot.  Done appropriately, there are major shifts in cardio/vascular, neuro-endocrine, lymphatic, Eastern energy that are POWERFUL.  Physiology can open to the micro-cellular level, and the chemicals produced to open vessels and transform endocrine response are extremely complex.  Such sequences, if done appropriately, are, in a very real way, “hard” in the power of their impact rather than beings so soft as to be little more than a respite from stressful life.  Such sequences are extremely active and approximate the higher ends of yoga and meditation.  They are not just “meditative” or “esoteric” or “aesthetic” or “spiritual,” or some sort of generic physiological “relaxation respite,” but rather may be concretely physical/physiological, specifically therapeutic/restorative to specific body parts, and optimal health.

And so, the essence is not the body pose or “technique,” but rather, the unfelt changes [albeit measurable on CT scans and in blood chemistry, HR, BP, EEG, EKG, down to micro measures, such as opening micro vessels on blood vessels or optimized oxygenation of the outer reaches of brain tissue/appendages [vs. contraction to the the body core in intense exercise], or the reduction of demands on the neural-endocrine systems to allow more attention to monitoring subtle process such balancing/regulating salt levels in billions of cells and blood.

And so, when doing restorative-yin sequences, it can be helpful to realize the ultimate objectives are not simply finding tome to relax or to do ease poses.  When done appropriately, restorative-yin yoga is profoundly complex, profoundly active [i.e., flipping a switch from the sympathetic nervous system to the more stress-reducing para-sympathetic system]. And this, in turn, may not only serve optima physiological health, but also open a gateway into the esoteric/aesthetic/spiritual dimensions of human experience that may be tasted, but are never attained in a more active process.

This restorative-yin yoga process can be extended into most other yoga poses, if those poses are done slowly, holding the poses, breathing deeply, and doing sequences of related poses. In fact, it is possible that modern yoga may evolve into a process of slow, deep comprehensive stretching and, thus, escape the limits of a fitness model.

Globally, almost no one is doing restorative-yin yoga.  If it is to be effective, the modern world has rationalized that yoga must essentially be a fitness/workout model.  More active yoga, while not “wrong,” can counter such optimal, restorative dimensions.

While a “workout” approach to yoga is not wrong, it is narrow and often does not accomplish many of the objectives that it seeks to attain, such as weight loss, aerobic conditioning or healing/physical therapy [in fact, frequently producing injury].  

Suppleness

from pinkbluelovescute.com

“FLEXIBILITY” IS PERHAPS the most common physical aspect that is associated with yoga.  It is a quality to which practitioners aspire, as well as a quality that discourages and drives potential participants away. 

Our sense of “health” is evolving and changing, and so too, the concept of “flexibility.”   In this evolving sense of health, flexibility involves more than being able to touch one’s toes or head to knees.  Health is evolving from “fitness” through a more comprehensive “wellness” (that includes nutrition and stress reduction, and may stress functionality more than fitness’ strength/power) to an “optimal health” or “thriving” (vs. “surviving’). 

[For a look at the evolution of health, see Islands Of Grace post, “Thriving: Toward The Cutting Edge of Health, 4/18/13.] 

In optimal health/thriving, there is a transformation from an emphasis on “skeletal flexibility” to a more holistic suppleness of the body.

The term suppleness expands “flexing” to describe a process of opening the entire body rather than emphasize stretching and strengthening muscle and connective tissue. Attention to suppleness directs actions to

• Muscle and connective tissue, and
• the internal organs of the central body,
• and the micro-structures of all cell tissue (with special attention to opening the fringes of the body—the outer edges of the brain and appendages—).to open cardio- and neuro-endocrine- and, lymphatic- and Eastern energy channels.

from catalog.nucleusic.com

[Example shows the difficulty of trying to illustrate the gross complexity of the chest/shoulder (with no regard to the complexity of the micro-anatomy of this body region).  The lymph system is not illustrated yet present, nor is the more visible muscular/ligament structure that tends to be the most conscious aspect.  The density of tissue [bone, muscular, vascular, nervous] illuminates the need for suppleness as crucial to allow openness in such density.]

Traditional fitness flexibility may either miss or even encumber efforts toward suppleness.  Suppleness leads to activities that release body tension by “flipping a switch” to engage the parasympathetic nervous system.  Real “hip openers” and opening the “floating bones “ of the upper back/shoulders and the lower back and neck aspire to free the body—softening the body—to optimize the flow of body physiology rather than lengthen and strengthen muscle and connective tissue.  Strong muscles may be hard and impeded and even injured.

from www.uic.edu

micro anatomy example

In suppleness, the “vitality” of blood vessels and nerve tissue and lymph channels would become crucial loci for intervention with a goal of vitalizing these tissues, by reducing restriction not only in the joints (where muscle and connective tissue require attention) but also in the central body and fringes—down to micro structures such as capillaries and even further into the regulation of optimal sodium levels in the body) and by making them more responsive by enhancing relaxation skills.

The slow, deep comprehensive stretching of restorative yoga, yin yoga and soft power yoga fit well with this evolving sense of health that emphasizes suppleness. These practices are quite different from the flexibility orientation of traditional fitness models that optimize sports performance.