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Ashtanga yoga is my anchor. Yoga is my heart.

Last week I practiced Ashtanga at the home studio of my friend, Martin. A new home, a new home studio, but still built by Martin’s hands.

I used to practice regularly with Martin pre kids. Maybe a decade ago.

Vande gurunam opening chant. Joy. The familiar consonants whirling around my mouth. Tongue and jaw enjoying the muscle memory. 

Ekam inhale and off we go.

To move with the breath, in a small space with others. It’s so special. The warmth holding you in the intimacy of the studio box. Hands-on adjustments, confident, purposeful palms on the body to ease, open, guide.

The intensity of the ujayi breath, the count easing you through the asana. How the mind shuts off from all external distractions. Just this breath, this body, this now 45 year-old body moving.

I look back on my body and life of a decade ago. Pre kids, I had all the time to practice. The feelings of gratitude. Connection to body. Deepening the practice (overstretching the ligaments?).

Such fantastic teachers and their memories arise with every asana.

Utthita Parsvakonasana, 2012, sweaty Koh Samui, Michel Besnard whispers in ear: “You’re better than you think you are” and tears fall silently. There’s no hiding on a mat.

April’s toes grounding backs of heels in utkatasana.

Over the past decade this body has worked hard. It’s grown and birthed two children. 

Lax ligaments. Painful pregnancies. Record-breaking labour times.

Hours of yin melting heart on the bathroom floor to slow everything down. Days of aching shoulders afterwards.

Torpedo babies launched into serene birthing pools leaving a trail of unseen decimation inside. Nirvana album cover masking the silent damage.

Broken for years. No mula bandha. No grounding. A need for reconstruction. Surgery to fix this body. 

A week later, an unexpected emergency. Extreme blood loss. Numb fingertips. Covid masks and loneliness in A&E.

Glaring theatre lights overhead and hands clasped fiercely round throat as I surrender to going under. No tongue swallowed but the memory remains.

So utterly broken physically and mentally. Pain. No connection to body.

Learning to use the bladder again. To feel again.

Building yourself up.

Everything that children take from you. Taking taking taking your sanity, health, your body. 

But the love. Oh the love.

A loss of foundation. Unmoored. Untethered. Set adrift.

Just through the sleep loss of babies, hormones saying a massive fuck you with their nightly 3am alarm call. Heavy limbs. Heavier eyelids.

Where is the body today? What practice is possible, realistic, doable? 

Where will it be in another 10 years?

But this body knows the asana. Onto the next one. Delighting in the drishti.

And you know what? This body is strong. It’s capable. It’s a bit more battered than 10 years ago but it’s  brilliant. It’s resilient. 

More awareness of edges, fewer binds, greater acceptance, less striving.

The unison of breath and body moving is so soothing. I know this. The bliss.

Moving breathing releasing feeling. Better than therapy and cheaper too. Cathartic.

Not the external Insta perfection – no sunset cliche poses. Instead, the grittiness. The internal work. The heart opening tears in backbends.

Martin’s familiar voice coaxing you out of savasana and back to the land of reality. The cold dark January night hitting you as you reluctantly step onto slabs and out onto the silent street.

Late night dog walkers trudging along the pavement. 

The routine. The regulation. The anchor.

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Breath

Your breath is your barometer of being.
Whether you’re up-tight or chilled-out, tired or energised, just a minute of watching the breath will tell you all you need to know. We all have this ability but so often we’re looking out instead of in.

There’s an analogy of a boat being tossed about on the surface of the water – weathering storms and everything life’s got to throw at it. Look under the water, follow the boat’s chain down to the bottom of the ocean, and there’s the anchor – strong, unwavering and steady. Our breath is the anchor.

If you practice looking inward and watching the breath when the sea is calm, in challenging times you can call upon it to provide resilience.

How to build this practice? Come to yin…

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Jack Kornfield’s wisest dharma teaching…

If you can sit quietly after difficult news;

if in financial downturns you remain perfectly calm;

if you can see your neighbours travel to fantastic places without a twinge of jealousy;

if you can happily eat whatever is put on your plate;

if you can fall asleep after a day of running around without a drink or a pill;

if you can always find contentment just where you are:

you are probably a dog.

– Jack Kornfield

Thanks to Norman Blair for sharing this poem many years ago. xx

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The Sacred Pause

I shared these words from Jack Kornfield on Sunday in a workshop and I thought we can all do with a reminder…

Our life can take on a whirlwind quality of working, responding, answering, solving, building, caring, tending and enjoying. When we are busy, and conflicts or difficulties arise, we can easily find ourselves overwhelmed, or reacting to problems in ways that make things worse.

Because experience happens so quickly, unskillful habitual responses can come out of our mouth before we know it. It helps to practice skillful responses when things are easy. That way when things are tough, a healthy pattern is available, already set. It also helps to train ourselves to pause before we respond. This is called the sacred pause, a moment where we stop and release our identification with problems and reactions. Without a pause our actions are automatic.

In a moment of stopping, we break the spell between past result and automatic reaction. When we pause, we can notice the actual experience, the pain or pleasure, fear or excitement. In the stillness before our habits arise, we become free to act wisely.

In this pause, we can examine our intention. If we have set a long-term intention or dedication for our life, we can remember our vows. Or we can simply check our motivation. Are we caught up, upset, angry, trying to get even, win at any cost? Or with a pause, can we take the time to act out of respect for ourself and others, to sow seeds of understanding and courage? It is in our hands.

The power of intention is most easily visible in our speech. In conversation, we get immediate feedback, and often the response we get will reflect our intention. Before we speak, we can pause and sense our motivation. Is our motivation one of compassion and concern for everyone? Or do we want to be right? Clarifying our intention is critical in times of difficulty. When there is difference or conflict, do we genuinely want to hear about the concerns of the other? Are we open to learn, to see other perspectives?

Try this during your next argument or conflict: Take a pause. Hold everyone’s struggle in compassion. Reflect on your highest intention. Whenever things get difficult, pause before you speak and sense your wisest motivation. From there, it will all flow better.

This is the secret of wise speech. As the Buddha describes it: “Speak with kindly motivation. Speak what is true and helpful, speak in due season and to the benefit of all.” When we pause and connect with our highest intention, we learn to see with eyes of compassion and everything becomes more workable.

Excerpt from The Wise Heart

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Happy New Year by Donna Ashworth

When I say ‘happy new year’,

I’m not for a moment,

expecting this to occur,

for that is not possible,

a year must be all things.

Happiness must come and go,

like the tides and the winds,

just as sadness,

and all the emotions in between.

When I say ‘happy new year’,

I’m really wishing you,

a baseline of peace,

of gratitude.

Because if you can sit with these things,

for the most part,

happiness will thrive,

when it does arrive,

and sadness will know its place in the mix.

If you can nourish these things,

daily,

you will also grow hope,

for it flourishes in such soil.

And hope is the key,

to this enigmatic state

of ‘happiness’ we seek.

When I say ‘happy new year’,

I’m really wishing you more happy days,

than sad days,

more joy than misery,

more laughter than tears…

and the wisdom to accept,

that they all belong.

Happy new year, my friends.

Happy new year.

Celebrate the new year by coming along to a yin workshop. View future dates.

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Recognise, release and return

I’m having a really busy week. A big event on at work and two family birthdays at the weekend mean my mind is receiving a seriously hard workout.

Our minds have various tendencies and one of them is that we are a planner or a dweller.

We either plan future actual or imaginary events, or we ruminate over things from the past. We might replay conversations or events from yesterday or many years ago. 

I’m a planner. What’s your tendency?

Whichever place your mind goes, I use a handy way to bring my mind back to the present.

Martin Aylward’s 3Rs

Meditation teacher, Martin Aylward, says: 

We RECOGNISE when the mind has wandered;

We RELEASE from the thoughts;

And we RETURN to the breath (and the sensations of the body)

I believe it’s useful to add the sensations of body as an extra anchor for our practice and this is equally relevant for sitting meditation and yin practice.

Our monkey minds always want to wander so it’s likely you’ll need to use the 3Rs many times during a practice.

Let me know how it goes for you! If you’d like to hear me use this in a workshop, take a look at upcoming dates.

View upcoming workshop dates
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Making mistakes

Every morning I lay my son’s clothes out to help him get dressed. It was PE day so it was navy tracksuit trousers. Once dressed, he headed downstairs and was dancing to the radio. The bottoms of the trousers were above his ankles.

“Oh Jacob, I think you’ve got your sister’s tracksuit trousers on,” I said.

“But you laid them out for me,” he replied. I told him I’d made a mistake. I’d got them mixed up. 

This stopped him mid dance move. He spun around to look at me, eyes and mouth wide open. “But you’re a grown-up,” he exclaimed in shock. “Grown-ups don’t make mistakes!”

I was blowing this six-year-old’s mind.

His response really surprised me. I explained that we all make mistakes and that no one is perfect. 

It made me realise we need to show our imperfections more. The pressure we put on ourselves and, as a result, those around us isn’t realistic or attainable. It’s about being kind to ourselves.

In an entertaining podcast with Brene Brown, she talks about whether people are honestly doing the best they can. She carried out research and found that those who thought others weren’t, tended to be harder on themselves. They lacked self compassion.

Jacob now knows about my recent speeding ticket and that the police told me off. When he asked whether I was going to jail, I reassured him that probably wasn’t going to happen.

Let’s hope I’m not raising future criminals…

If you feel ‘off track’, remember that there is no ‘track’. This is your life. It ebbs and flows, twists and halts and speeds up. It all belongs. Stop trying to be a robot who is productive and perfect all of the time. You’re not a robot. You’re a human. Be alive to it all.

Jamie Varon

Yin yoga workshops in St Albans

My next yin yoga workshop will be on Sunday 14 May.

More info
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Gaia House: Insight and intentions

I’ve recently returned from a three-day silent retreat at Gaia House in Devon.

I was last there in 2015 for five days – a long time ago! Whenever I go there, I leave with some insight and intentions.

Insights

  • We have the answers inside us. We just have to spend time looking within and connecting to the breath and bodily sensations.
  • Surrounded by silence and 57 other retreatants, it’s possible to feel totally supported and loved.
  • When we speak, we craft how we come across. We perform, we construct our persona. When words are taken away from us, we are ourselves in our purest form. Our true nature shines through.
  • Spiritual practice nourishes and grounds me in a way that no other activity can.
  • My mind will seek written stimulation wherever possible – intently reading the small print on teabag boxes in the absence of phones, books or the ability to write notes.
  • So many of my thoughts are linked to words. Conversations had and imagined, paragraphs of text drafted before pen even hits the paper. These thoughts and plans take me away from the present.
  • Stillness allows me to notice the small things. During a standing meditation practice in the gardens, I had the honour of simply watching two mice going about their business collecting grass, ducking in and out through the grass paths and tunnels they’d created.
  • I could speak less. The rule of 50/50 in conversations: spend 50% of the time listening, 50% speaking.
  • Intense practice opens me up in such a strong way. Lots of emotional vulnerability and increased sensitivity on leaving the retreat.
  • Feelings of loving kindness or ‘metta’ towards strangers – compassion towards the farmer who shouted at me when I accidentally trespassed on her land. An opportunity to witness the impact of the exchange on my mind in subsequent meditation practices.

Intentions

  • Create silence where possible. Turn the radio off, enjoy silence in the car when I’m in it on my own
  • Awareness of the daily trance – put my phone down
  • Sitting or walking practice
  • More asana practice
  • Get back into the habit of listening to podcasts by Buddhist teachers
  • Be kinder to myself. We all make mistakes. Lessen the self criticisms and perceived shortcomings
  • Visit Gaia House every year
  • Start teaching yoga again…
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The curse of looking forward

I was talking recently in a workshop about how we all have tendencies. In Sanskrit these are called ‘vasanas’. It is how we tend to behave. We may be someone who tends to see the negative instead of the positive.

We may be the sort of person who dwells on the past (“I wish I’d said this instead of that” or “I really should have done x instead of y”)  – I do this. Likewise, we may tend to be always looking to the future.

We all like to have things to look forward to but if you know that this is your tendency, Lockdown will have been particularly difficult.

I was having a walk with my partner. We were walking through a beautiful meadow of wild flowers and he said how we’ll be able to do plenty of walks like this when we go on holiday in two months’ time. I pointed out that we were doing a beautiful walk right now and it was only a five minute drive from our home.

We all like things to look forward to and I think Lockdown has deprived us of this joy. But what if a second wave hits? How will we feel if all these holidays booked in haste are snatched away from us?* How do you deal with uncertainty?

I read a quote once – I can’t remember who said it – about how life isn’t those one-off experiences. It isn’t about the time we swam with dolphins. It’s about the everyday stuff – the brushing of our teeth and doing the washing up.

Lockdown is this and other simple things: watching plants grow in our gardens, enjoying local walks. So let’s keep up with that because you never know, that holiday might not happen.

‘Hameed Ali, author and contemporary spiritual teacher, reminds us that if we are not living with awareness of our body, we are not fully alive:

Sincerely explore for yourself, are you here or not? Are you in your body or oblivious, or only aware of parts of it? When I say, “Are you in your body?” I mean, “Are you completely filling your body?”

Are you really in your hands or do you move them from a distance? Are you present in your cells, inhabiting and filling your body? If you aren’t in your body, what significance is there in your experience this moment? Are you preparing, so that you can be here in the future? Are you setting up conditions by saying to yourself, “When such and such happens I’ll have time, I’ll be here.” If you are not here, what are you saving yourself for?’

Taken from Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance, p98.

*I’m very sorry if you were booked to go to Spain…

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Pearls of Wisdom

I came across this reading in Rachel Naomi Remen’s beautiful book My Grandfather’s Blessings and it felt so apt for this time. Can we treat coronavirus as a grain of sand? This experience will inevitably have a lasting effect on every one of us. Perhaps it will teach us about what we choose to value in life.

Some of the oldest and most delightful written words in the English language are the collective nouns dating from medieval times used to describe groups of birds and beasts.  Many of these go back five hundred years or more, and lists of them appeared as early as 1440 in some of the first books printed in English. 

These words frequently offer an insight into the nature of the animals or birds they describe.  Sometimes this is factual and sometimes poetic.  Occasionally it is profound:  a pride of lions, a party of jays, an ostentation of peacocks, an exaltation of larks, a gaggle of geese, a charm of finches, a bed of clams, a school of fish, a cloud of gnats, and a parliament of owls are some examples.  Over time, these sorts of words have been extended to other things as well.  One of my favorites is pearls of wisdom.

An oyster is soft, tender, and vulnerable.  Without the sanctuary of its shell it could not survive.  But oysters must open their shells in order to ‘breathe’ water.  Sometimes while an oyster is breathing, a grain of sand will enter its shell and become a part of its life from then on.

Such grains of sand cause pain, but an oyster does not alter its soft nature because of this.  It does not become hard and leathery in order not to feel.  It continues to entrust itself to the ocean, to open and breathe in order to live.  But it does respond.

Slowly and patiently, the oyster wraps the grain of sand in thin translucent layers until, over time, it has created something of great value in the place where it was most vulnerable to its pain.  A pearl might be thought of as an oyster’s response to its suffering.  Not every oyster can do this.  Oysters that do are far more valuable to people than oysters that do not.

Sand is a way of life for an oyster.  If you are soft and tender and must live on the sandy floor of the ocean, making pearls becomes a necessity if you are to live well.

Disappointment and loss are a part of every life. Many times we can put such things behind us and get on with the rest of our lives. But not everything is amenable to this approach. Some things are too big or too deep to do this, and we will have to leave important parts of ourselves behind if we treat them in this way. These are the places where wisdom begins to grow in us. It begins with suffering that we do not avoid or rationalize or put behind us. It starts with the realization that our loss, whatever it is, has become a part of us and has altered our lives so profoundly that we cannot go back to the way it was before.

Something in us can transform such suffering into wisdom. The process of turning pain into wisdom often looks like a sorting process. First we experience everything.  Then one by one we let things go, the anger, the blame, the sense of injustice, and finally even the pain itself, until all we have left is a deeper sense of the value of life and a greater capacity to live it.