Mulberry Jam

That’s how I feel after a three-day weekend of yoga with Kofi Busia. Since Kofi lives and teaches on the west coast, I am trying to take advantage of every opportunity when he travels east. Last week he was at Greater Baltimore Yoga on the north side of Baltimore, MD.

As at Omega, which I wrote about last August, he was merciless in a compassionate way. Once he zeros in on something he believes you need to work on, he won’t let you get away with anything. In my case, that’s posture in tadasana and extension in forward bends. The first day I was doing pretty well. I know he was smiling at my “See Kofi? I’ve been working so hard,” effort. The second day I was tired and had a harder time maintaining it. He caught it right away and started correcting me once more. “This is more like yesterday,” he’d whisper after guiding my slumped spine into a better position. More work is needed, but I still am clearly better than before working with him two months ago.

An interesting thing happened to me late on my last day with him. Towards the end of the afternoon practice we were all in paschimottanasana, a seated forward bend with straight legs. Even after five years of yoga practice forward bends are very challenging for me with my long legs and tight hamstrings. I was doing my level best to keep the spine extended as I folded forward, and moved my sternum away from the pubic bone to get more length. Suddenly a feeling of emotional upset came over me, like I was about to burst into tears. It didn’t fade, but continued through the final ten minutes of the practice. As I lay in shavasana at the end of class I was struggling to keep my composure. I couldn’t figure it out—I wasn’t in any pain, there was no reason I could think of why I should have the feeling that I might cry at any second.

I didn’t feel any better as I rose to roll up my mat. Kofi had spotted my trouble and asked if I was okay. “I don’t know,” I told him. “Something about that paschimottanasana upset me.” He impressed me all over again by knowing precisely what was wrong. A spasm of the diaphragm. He had me go into a backbend over a bolster and weighted my hips with a sandbag, but the sheet of muscle at the bottom of my ribs continued to flutter uncomfortably. So he got me up into a handstand and had me drop back (with his support) to put my feet on the seat of a chair behind me. At first I thought “OMG! My body won’t go that way!” But then it released and I was able to hold the pose for several seconds. He brought me back down and had me go into the backbend two more times, each time with greater ease. Then I felt exhilarated, not weepy. All was well.

This morning I couldn’t wait to tell my story to my students. More evidence that the body-mind-emotion link connects in all directions. Not only does our mind affect our body, with mental tension creating physical ills. The body directly affects the mind and emotions. In my case, a tightness in the breath signaled emotional upset to my mind. I literally couldn’t tell the difference between an emotional pain and a physical one. They felt the same. So keep smiling. When you frown your body thinks that something is wrong.

Mmmm. Still haven’t come down from a week of yoga with a teacher I admire immensely. Last Sunday I returned from the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, where Kofi Busia was teaching. We had yoga classes twice a day for a week.

This came along at just the right time for me. I was feeling kind of burned out after a six-month stint of teaching five classes a week. Because I was pouring so much energy into my classes, I was really neglecting my own personal practice. To have the luxury of a full week where I had nothing else to do but work on my own form and strength was heavenly. My great friends Fritz and Donna joined me to carpool up together and we had a ball, hanging together like the three musketeers the whole week.

The teacher was Kofi Busia, a yogi I admire tremendously. I wrote about him with enthusiasm last year after meeting him for the first time. Fritz and I had planned ever since that time to try to go to one of his longer workshops as soon as we could.  I love his teaching because he’s not only extremely knowledgeable about yoga asana and a million other topics (music, sports, physiology, you name it). He’s also a really warm human being. Sadly, that can’t be said about all well-known yogis. They tend to be intense, serious people and not always the kindest or most approachable. Kofi believes that yoga should make us better people, not just bendier people. It’s so typical that his website has no photos of himself, only of his teacher, BKS Iyengar.

The Omega Institute is like summer camp for grownups. It’s a little slice of new age heaven, with locally grown vegetarian food. It’s in the upper Hudson River valley just east of the Catskill Mountains. While forty of us were there for the yoga workshop, other visitors there for topics like Buddhist meditation, watercolor painting, songwriting, shamanism and “past life regression”. One afternoon the whole yoga class burst out laughing as we heard the most bloodcurdling screams coming from the past life workshop. (I don’t know if I’d want to know about my past lives!)

My practice has been tremendously influenced by that one week. It may be some time before all the ways it has affected me become clear.

A week ago, a friend gave me a copy of Elizabeth Gilbert’s book “Eat, Pray, Love.” I was aware of the book when it came out last year. A book with a focus on food and yogic philosophy? You’d think it would be right up my alley. But I waited to read it and was eventually discouraged by some negative reviews. People seem to either love it or hate it, with few people lukewarm about either Gilbert or her story. The book begins with Gilbert at a very low point, facing a bitter divorce in her early thirties, accompanied by severe depression. After settling the divorce she finds it difficult to re-engage in life, and seems unable to leave the pain of the broken marriage, compounded by an unhappy rebound love affair, behind. To escape from herself and the situation, she uses a book advance to take a full year off, spending four months successively in Italy, India and Indonesia. These are the three sections from which the book takes its title. She describes her travels as a search for God. God is definitely a part of this quest, but it’s also about trying to find a way to become sustainably comfortable in her own skin.

The outset of the book is heavy going, as Gilbert describes crying oceans of tears and spending night after night in misery on a series of bathroom floors. But she won me over completely once she and the book arrived in Italy. She gives herself over to food and the pleasures of daily life, including the beautiful Italian language. Her description of being charmed by the florid profanity and histrionics at a Roman soccer game conveys her affection for Italy, and is itself completely charming. It is an abrupt change to follow her to a yoga ashram in India, living a life of austerity and prayer. Her new regimen includes five hours daily of scrubbing floors, a vegetarian diet, and daily wake-up calls at 3:30AM for prayer. But her search for an experience of God over four months of prayer and meditation is rewarded with a true glimpse of the transcendent. The final stage of her journey, in Bali, is embodied by a voice that’s clearly older and wiser than the desperate woman who began the story.

As with most memoir, the question for the reader is can you sympathize with (or in some cases, stomach) the complaints of the writer. In re-reading the negative reviews, it seems many critics couldn’t relate to her troubles or her goals. Before diving into the book, I had my own concerns about whether it would be my cup of tea. In the past I haven’t been a big fan of the hits of modern memoir. Excerpts I’ve read from books like “Prozac Nation” or “Running with Scissors” have left me cold. I feel little besides impatience with what seems to me to be endless navel gazing, wallowing in sad childhoods and victim psychology. This book, however, sucked me in immediately. Gilbert has an entertaining voice, able to cover her early mid-life crisis with a touch that’s doesn’t minimize her pain, but is light enough that she avoids taking herself altogether seriously. And she’s genuinely working to try to improve herself, to find happiness and to make her life better. Again and again, her wit and irreverence kept the book from being sappy or tiresome. I was happy for the hard-won equanimity she found, and enjoyed sharing the voyage with her.

Thanks, Kim, for giving this one to me!

Several of my yoga students have asked about the music I play during class. I know many teachers disapprove of music during practice, but I feel it helps create a unique mental space for the practice and also creates an aural buffer for those of us living in noisy urban environments!

I’ve set up a couple of music mixes that I play on my iPod during class, and have posted three of them on the iTunes website. Here’s the first one I thought might interest my readers:

My beloved mulberry tree had another gift for me this week.

This blog, of course, owes its name to the mulberry in front of my house. (See “Why Mulberry Jam?”) The masthead on this page is a photo of the tree in autumn. This fall my mulberry faithfully turned its usual spectacular shade of gold. You would laugh if you saw my photo library because it has WAY too many pictures of this tree. Every year I can’t resist taking another series of shots trying to capture the evanescent beauty of the turning leaves.

As it happens, this year we’ve had a very warm fall, with only a few light frosts all the way up through mid-November. As a result, the leaves have hung on much later than normal. Up until Saturday the mulberry held all its leaves, hovering protectively over the house and lighting up the whole street with the brilliance of their yellow color.

Finally on Sunday morning we woke up to a heavy frost with temperatures well below freezing. A light coating of silver lay over everything. From my kitchen window I looked out and saw the morning sun beginning to strike the tree. And then it started. As the sun warmed the leaves that were made heavy by their coating of frost, they began to fall. At first just a few here and there, but in a few minutes, the tree was creating a rain of golden heart-shaped leaves. There was no breeze, so the leaves fell straight down to the ground, fluttering gently and turning over in the sunlight on their way.

I ran out in my bathrobe and stood beneath the tree. The sound was incredible on a quiet Sunday morning. Without the usual sounds of traffic I could clearly hear the leathery rustle of the leaves as they fell past their fellows and landed gently on the ground. I was surrounded by bright fluttering coins that brushed my head and shoulders as they fell. I ran back in for my camera and attempted to capture the image.

There is no word in English to describe that feeling of mingled joy and sadness at the beauty of fleeting experience. The Japanese have the concept of “mono no aware,” or the sadness of things. It’s very much connected to a Buddhist sense of the brevity of life and the transience of beauty, summed up in the old Japanese phrase “swirling petals, falling leaves.” It’s partly that spirit that encourages the entire nation to turn out for cherry blossom viewing or hanami, during the brief days when the sakura are in flower.

On Sunday morning, the rain of leaves continued, until within an hour the tree was almost completely bare. By afternoon on the same day the formerly brilliant leaves had faded to a dull brown that thickly carpeted our front walk and yard. Now the tree stands with naked branches, waiting for spring.

In the days before I fell sick last week, I was talking to my yoga students about the unity of body and mind. Lying on the sofa for days with a nasty cold gave me plenty of time to reflect on the mind-body connection.

I think most people recognize that mental stress and tension definitely affect the body. Iyengar wrote “While yoga may begin with the cult of the body, it leads toward the cultivation of our consciousness. As we cultivate our mind, we are able to avoid the stress that would otherwise lodge itself in our body, causing disease and suffering.” (Light on Life, B.K.S. Iyengar.) I know that some of the worst illnesses in my life have definitely had a relationship to the stress in my daily life. Mind you, I don’t think this relationship always applies to things like simple colds. Sometimes you just get exposed to people with infectious conditions. But I do believe that when the soul is sick, the body is likely to be also.

What I think we are less likely to remember is that the reverse relationship also applies: the stress of the body affects the mind. I remember reading a report on a small study where women with serious depression were given Botox injections. The Botox was not used in this case for cosmetic purposes but to relax their habitual sad and frowning facial expressions. Shortly thereafter, the women reported a dramatic improvement in their moods and a lifting of their depression symptoms. (See articles that appeared in the Washington Post and FoxNews among other places.)

This study was far from scientific, being much too small and with limited follow-up on the women. But I found it very thought provoking. Why do we so often act as though the body-mind link communicates only one way, from mind to body? We know that a rough day at the job engenders headaches and tight shoulders. Why should we doubt that holding the body with poor posture or habitual imbalances or an angry facial expression can also negatively affect both mind and spirit?

Have you ever seen photographs of Tibetan Buddhist monks? One thing that always strikes me is how pleasant they look. Many of them have faces of such kindness and warmth you can’t help but feel they’d be wonderful people to know. I believe it has to be related to the kind of meditation they habitually practice, of meditating with compassion for the world and all its problems. Doing that kind of spiritual work day after day has to make itself felt in the body and especially in the face. Or perhaps because they habitually smile and look kindly their spirits naturally become more compassionate as a result. The outside and the inside are one and the same.

On Saturday I was the beneficiary of a stroke of great luck. A friend called me to say that a highly-respected teacher from the Iyengar tradition, Kofi Busia, would be teaching in the Washington area over the weekend, and would I like to go with her to an advanced workshop? It took less than a minute for me to decide, Yes!

Kofi Busia is the teacher of my teacher’s teacher. He was a senior student to Iyengar himself for many years, but is quick to say he’s not a typical Iyengar-style teacher. He has never been certified by any organization, but when you meet him you quickly realize you’re in the presence of a bona fide master. During the course of a three hour class, his deep knowledge, on subjects ranging far beyond yoga asana,was awe inspiring. Well, I was certainly awed. Mr. Busia is African, and he teaches through story-telling. He talked about everything from Ayurvedic body types, to the origins of the Spiritualist movement in America, to how lions hunt their prey (as contrasted with how tigers and leopards hunt). All this plus his insightful teachings about asana have given me teaching material and work for my own personal practice.

Especially since I was disappointed in my efforts to go away for a yoga intensive this summer, I was happy to get to do some advanced work with a new teacher, even on a smaller scale. (See “Switching Gears.”) I sincerely hope I have the opportunity to study with Mr. Busia again soon.

I’m back home in Falls Church after taking a week out of town.  Mid-August is a very good time to be away from Washington.  Months ago, I booked myself for a weeklong yoga intensive with a well-respected Iyengar-style teacher.  For weeks before I was beefing up my home practice to try to be prepared, since the man leading the seminar has a reputation as a precise and demanding instructor.  Sadly, the course had to be cancelled when our teacher suffered a serious injury the very evening before the course was supposed to begin.

So there I was last Monday morning, all dressed up in my yoga clothes and nowhere to go. When you’ve spent that long building up to something it takes a while to switch gears.  I was so flummoxed it took me a good hour to get my head around it.  I had come up to the retreat center in New York’s Hudson River Valley planning to be there all week, and I really didn’t want to go home and go back to work!  So I checked the train schedule and called my family in Western New York to see if they’d mind an impromptu visit.  My mother was flatteringly happy to hear I’d be coming, even though I gave them only a few hours notice.  The rest of the week passed not with a grueling yoga practice but with home-cooked meals and catching up on all the family news.

I was reminded again of how much I enjoy traveling by train.  I spent many hours on the train up to Rochester and then all the way back to Washington at the end of the week, and it couldn’t have been more pleasant.  No check-in hassles, a big wide seat, and huge windows with scenic views.  The Empire Limited runs from New York’s Penn Station up along the Hudson River to Albany and then straight west through all the old industrial cities of the state:  Schenectady, Utica, Rome, Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo.  Along the river I saw mountains, forests, and dozens of water birds including no fewer than four bald eagles in a single afternoon.  Traveling west from Albany the views were a bit more noir-ish.  I saw many empty old industrial mills, faded ghost signs painted on old brick buildings (“Uneeda Biscuits, 5c”), and strangely quiet city centers.  I also saw lots and lots of cornfields in between.  That ethanol stuff is changing the landscape of rural America—from what I saw it seemed there was no other crop planted.

No photos, I’m afraid, since I was traveling without my camera.  I didn’t expect to want it at a yoga retreat!

Tuesday our high here was 83 warm and glorious degrees. At the house we had the windows open wide, and the breezes were wafting through the house stirring up dust bunnies from under the furniture all day. Dust bunnies are a small price to pay for the soft spring air, but it was a bit disconcerting to come across them out in the middle of the room. There, out in the open and testifying to my lackadaisical housekeeping instead of skulking under the sofa like any self-respecting dust bunny should.

Mark and I spent about half an hour jump-starting our little Miata convertible. We felt very ashamed to have let her battery run down, but it was such an unpleasant winter we never even thought about taking her out for a run. Such a game little car. All it took was a five-minute jump and she was back to purring like her old self again. Now that convertible weather is here, we won’t let that happen again.

We aren’t the only ones with spring fever. In the morning I arrived at one of the yoga classes I teach at 9, as usual. I came from the beautiful weather out in the parking lot into the small room where we have our classes and it was hard to be indoors. When my students began to arrive they were all saying how much they hated to come inside. There was a short pause. Well why not? we all thought at the same moment. So class was held outdoors on the pool deck, a first. Fortuitously, I had already planned to do a class of “chair yoga” so that meant people didn’t have to be down on the pavement. We all had a great time with it, and as soon as class was over people were saying, “we should do this again!”

My friends know that yoga is a huge part of my life. Be warned: I’m quite capable of boring you silly by going on about how great yoga is for what ails you. But I do wish that more yogis showed at least a bit of a sense of humor. There’s so much earnest seriousness in the yoga world. So many high-achieving people are out there trying to get into the perfect asana pose, maintain the perfect diet, or reach perfect purity of mind. That makes the whole discipline seem so humorless and “good for you” in a medicinal kind of way. I don’t know anyone who has a perfect body, and I can’t even imagine a perfect mind. So let’s all have a good laugh while we’re down on the floor, can’t we?

Trying to do my bit to make sure that the phrase “yoga humor” doesn’t read as an oxymoron, here’s a great link. A friend who went through yoga teacher training with me sent a story from the New York Times (thank you Suzanne!). The title is “Guns and Yoga,” and here’s the opening paragraph:

Not long ago, I decided to learn how to shoot guns. It was a Saturday morning, and I was curious. So after a breakfast of spelt flakes, soy milk and green tea, I went out shooting.

Well of course who wouldn’t read the opening paragraph after an opening like that? I got sucked in. For the rest, go to the full article on the NY Times website: “Guns and Yoga,” by Patton Oswalt.