It’s not uncommon to hear students remark how much calmer, grounded, settled and at ease they feel after a yoga session. It’s almost as if we reconnect with how the mind feels at the end of the class.  Yogasana certainly has an impact on the mind and this is appreciated by many who practice; it’s less common to recognize the impact the mind can have as we practice and to work directly this way round. 

Why is our mind so important when we practice?

We can integrate mindfulness and yoga at varying levels and degrees. We can know how the body moves, we can be aware of our breathing, its depth and rhythm, awareness of muscles tensing and releasing and the shape our body makes using the mind as the observer. We can also invite the mind to observe itself as well. This capacity to directly observe mind and mind states such as frustration, annoyance, fear, wanting and the impact they have reveals a more subtle form of automatic pilot, where strength and physical effort push through inconvenient mind states in the search for balance and ease. 

Be curious about your mind

When our mindfulness expands to include mind states we begin a process of increasing curiosity that accepts we are not always calm, happy and unstressed even in our practice and how this impacts our physical experience. Our sense of limitation may have nothing to do with our physical body but that doesn’t stop us using strength and effort to push through in our impatience, irritation or desire to succeed. In doing so we miss the subtlety that yoga has to offer and a ‘good’ practice can simply become one where we feel ‘good’, where the endorphins and dopamine give us a high and cortisol reduces so we feel calm. This is like sugar candy, a pleasant sensation, a treat to be enjoyed when it occurs but if we expect this as a result every time, what happens when it doesn’t?

Without discriminating curiosity, we are in danger of spiritual by-pass and get caught in the idea that because we practice yoga or meditation, we should always be calm, happy and without discomfort. Innumerable times in the last 25 years I’ve been told, ‘you’re a yoga teacher, you don’t have any stress’.  Implicit is the invitation to believe that these sensations and emotions are a sign of spiritual failure or the yoga ‘not working’ and so either should not be felt or should be ‘held in check’. Nothing is farther from the truth. 

Mental obstacles are not your enemy

The release from our addictions or aversions or other mental obstacles such as doubt, lethargy, indolence, procrastination, restless and worry are very high attainments in the Buddhist path to freedom, so they are going to be around for quite a while. Our yoga practice is not a place to escape them, but a safe place to work with them. It’s important to realise that they are not ’bad’ of themselves and simply arise because the conditions are right for them to do so. What matters is our next step and our yoga practice is the ideal place to explore this.

​Our addictions have a sense of dissatisfaction about them, they’re acquisitive, needing to be the best (rather than the best I can be today), to compete and above all to win. They come with a lack of generosity and compassion towards our self and others; our sense of wellbeing often predicated on being a bit better in some measure than we were yesterday and certainly to those around us.  So what happens as we age, and capacity reduces? Do we abandon our yoga rather than work with the uncomfortable truth it gently reveals?

Our aversions can be even more insidious. We can often brace, push, strive, demand adjustment or even take anti-inflammatories to subjugate and punish our body using our desires and goals as cover from what is often a rejection of ourselves; if this is where we are with our practice, a trip to the candy shop can confuse the deeper work of learning kindness and loving acceptance towards ourselves.

Connecting to the felt experience

To start to see what is really going on, it’s important for us to engage both our 1st and 2nd brain in our practice: our first brain is our rational, logical, reasoning, concept and language based brain the one that understands the placement, shape, sequence of the posture; our second brain is all about the felt experience and our reaction to it. It is completely non-verbal and by-passes the 1st brain. 

The felt experience embraces the head and importantly the physical brain as well as the rest of the body and yet many students, when asked to point to their body, indicate everything below their chin as if the body is the life support system for the thinking mind. Once we become sensitive to the sensation of the brain we begin to notice how there is a feeling of tension whenever addiction or aversion takes it out of balance.  

Soft Listening

As we gradually learn to release this tension we tap into something quite extraordinary we call ”soft listening” that opens our heart to a more compassionate and loving acceptance of ourselves and a greater sense of mental balance. Our body immediately responds to this, opening up and softening allowing the support of the energetic body to replace the need for strength and allowing our body to move into balance instead of striving and bracing. Everything begins to flow and we notice a lightness and ease in postures where before there was heaviness and effort. We experience effortless backbends and weightless inversions. Our body is the same but our relationship to mind states has changed. In this way our practice becomes increasingly effortless, the breath deep and at ease allowing us to express ourselves at our best and revealing a clear-awareness that is naturally mindful, joyful and full of still energy. 

 Truly our mind is part of our posture and that has made all the difference.




 


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​It’s good to be reminded that however eclectically we inhabit our bodies we all have an innate flexibility to re-discover, a forgotten experience of our body from our distant past and with it so much more if we choose.
 
The new men’s session I’ve created drew in a physically diverse group with a range of strengths, injuries and limitations all committed to sports training.  Together our combined experience spanned rock-climbing, sponsored mountain biking, rugby, weight lifting, swimming amongst other disciplines and of course yoga.
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Challenging the instinctive beliefs of such a group about the nature of core support is an interesting process. How might it be possible that working from the centre doesn’t need strength; that in fact our traditional notions of strength get in the way?
 
To begin our individual inquiry into this seeming contradiction/craziness, we started a progressive practice with a series of simple body movements to develop core connection. In exploring old habits and trained ways of using the body coupled with mental beliefs, such as “I’m not flexible”, “I’ve never been able to…” everyone saw very quickly how we create patterns of holding that limit our capacity to move freely and in balance. It’s liberating to discover that there’s a choice around these habits and patterns, and when we do, we begin to see the limitation of rigid strength as support with its brittleness and stiffness and start to explore the meaning of balance and resilience. 
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Throughout the session we kept focus on our centre as the origin of movement as well as our support.  Feeling a range of movement open up was surprising to the group in its unfamiliarity but completely intuitive and primal with their minds ‘out of the way’.
 
It’s a very different perspective to tune into tension within the body in this way and it takes time, curiosity and a sense of humour to explore. When release comes (and this is progressive), it can be a shock to understand just how we have chosen to inhabit our body, how tension has conditioned the way we relate to our body, and how our body now feels. Knowing what it means to feel at ease in our skin can feel bittersweet at the start.
 
However as the body settles into a re-found sense of ease without loss of either integrity, structure or support, the opportunity for active relaxation follows. So, at the end of the session I invited the group to become still and experience for themselves how it’s not only our bodies that can become more open, supple and at ease. It’s a fallacy that men are not flexible, as the smiles around the room confirmed.

Why go on retreat? It sounds indulgent and a little self-absorbed.
 
I’ve been on many retreats over 35 years, some just a few days, others for months at a time. They have all informed and expanded my practice and perspective: some for a short period; others continuing to resonate years afterwards. Retreats with my teacher for the last 10 years; Bhante Vimalaramsi are definitely in the latter camp. Drawn directly from the 2500 year old teaching of the Buddha as described in the Suttas, his teaching is disarmingly simple, so simple that the biggest obstacle is to get out of the way of the practice. When we own this simplicity what unfolds is a completely different perspective on experience that leads to a deeper understanding of how to live a life of balance, connection and freedom and how we obstruct this.
 
This February I travelled to Penang in Malaysia to explore this more fully under his guidance. Located in the outskirts of Georgetown, where traffic is unexpectedly light and surprisingly courteous towards pedestrians, the centre is starkly juxtaposed between skyscrapers and dense forest. The welcome was simple and uncomplicated, the accommodation comfortable and unfussy with the sound of distant traffic drowned out by the call of monkeys and unfamiliar birdsong. Coupled with this, the soft heat of the tropics and the unfamiliar diet all made for a sensory recalibration; letting go of familiar patterns of thought and behaviour, a useful precursor for any mental recalibration to come.

There was no common language except that of a common intent and purpose

There is something about being part of a group on retreat that creates a uniquely supportive environment. There were students from all over Asia and beyond, unusually many more men than women. There was no common language except that of a common intent and purpose. That was all we needed. The human condition is universal. We all understood why we were there and respected each other for it. For someone whose first 15 years of retreats were solitary I never tire of the palpable but unstated sense of caring and support such a group generates. It creates a safe place to be open and listening, to see and understand how our preferences for and against experience creates the feeling of separation and individualism, how we use the sense of ‘other’ to land all the inconvenient truths of our experience rather than take responsibility for them. 

Recognising unskillful patterns and electing to do something different

We are so used to justifying the way we are that it takes time and patience during the retreat for this to fall away. When it does we recognise the subtle and sometimes not so subtle tension it creates in us. Choosing to release this allows us to recognise the universally unskillful patterns we create in ourselves and others and the joyfulness that arises when we elect to do something different. Substituting the skillful for the unskillful can be as simple as smiling at the way our mind gets caught sowing the seeds for a new neural response. 
 
There is little questioning about the value of retreat in Asia. However modern the outward appearance, however familiar some of the global brands and presentations there is still underneath it all the beat of a different drum. It’s understood that whilst it’s you who’s here, it’s not all about you. As the hours and days pass you too come to remember it’s more ‘we’ than ‘me’ and recognise our responsibility is toward this inter-connectedness rather than individuality.
 
And when it comes to an end, what then? Was it all just respite from a busy and frantic world and our life embedded within it? As the experience of a retreat passes into memory, what continues to resonate is the truth we felt about some aspect of the human condition wherever we find ourselves afterwards.      ​

Artwork by Marty Woods

(c) copyright Simon Pooley

"Escape
and push aside
those dark walls that
have denied your freedom"

It's the beginning of a poem I wrote about the age of 11;  touched by death and finding no complication in expressing and sharing what was both deeply felt but simultaneously simple.  I see this capacity in the children I now teach who naturally and effortlessly connect and share. Now and again I've thought of that poem, either prompted by circumstance or just curious to re-find the words of the lost verses that followed. Though incomplete,  the essence nevertheless remains for me and takes me back to a time when feelings were not so lost in translation.

Round about the same time I was dancing as a raven down the aisle of Worcester cathedral. It was the 1980s and I was taking part in a children's opera called Noye's Fludde. I felt completely alive in my body, connected, so attuned to the wings of this dark bird. Hers was a dance of a flight that had no return, where the ending was unknown; but she flew with such lightness and with hope, however impossible it seemed to find a home for herself and her companions in the Ark. I loved that dance. I loved its liminal thread of both life's promise and possibility and at the same time prescient death.

Quite why and how dance slipped out of my life I cannot now exactly say, but it is a loss that moved with me as I stepped further away from those moments of joy.

My capacity to do 'well' gathered apace but so too a deeper decay set seed and flourished. To a degree I was anaesthetised from the choices I was making: the clothes I wore seemed well-fitting and there was approbation for my direction. I progressively cloaked my truth.

One day so very many years later it began to rain and instead of running in, I stayed out and started dancing with my children in the garden allowing our bodies to become completely wet. We played music, opened the windows and felt the wetness seep through our clothes and into our skin. With bare feet, the grass wrapped like wet blankets through our toes and the soil spread around the outside edges of the arches of our feet. We smiled, we laughed, we delighted in the outpouring, it felt warm, it was fun to be the other way round, together.

Rain
"It rained today, and from far away
I remembered all the windows in my house were open.
At first it settled with the dust
a fine mist intermingling and absorbing,
but as the rain grew more intense
there was a beating that could not be neglected,
though I was out.
Rivulets first began to run
washing without force my stairs
and finding passageways to gather
but in time, with no abating
a torrent was in flow
when I finally returned,
aching and wasting,
it carried me away
and I landed on another shore
like a newly polished stone.
I tried to find my house again
but it was far and I did not know the way
but if I had
I would have found the doors and windows firmly shut
and no promise of rain."


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​(c) copyright Lewis Noble, Sowter Falls

I left my home and walked alone towards an ancient track high on a ridge where a watershed lies of two great rivers.  Here the water that falls can only move in opposite directions finding and joining either the flow of the Thames or the Avon. It's a fertile place too and the soil in these parts has been described as "the glory of the county...deep, sound, friable, yet capable of tenacity; and adapted to every plant that can be trusted to it" (Arthur Young).  It felt good to be rooted in my feet, feeling the cushion of the earth while looking out across a wide view west and contemplating the way ahead.

It's New Year, a traditional time to take stock, reassess and define new directions.  One of these is the decision to use this blog to share more of the experience of teaching, practice and enquiry.  Not all change comes from such a deliberate decision, in fact we may not recognise the importance of the moment until much later. I wrote what follows in 2010 about such a moment that happened 3 or 4 years previously and the huge impact it had.

It’s a cold damp morning, I’ve just spent five minutes negotiating getting out of bed and walking ten paces to the bathroom. I’m now in child position wondering how I’ll ever get back let alone complete a salutation. Less than 24 hours ago I tore something in my back and spent six hours in A & E. The painkillers dull more than the pain and I’ve decided to reduce the dose accepting that some pain is better than feeling nothing.

I’m foetus like mentally and physically, and feel unlikely to move just from fear of pain. I’m so tense. I continue to breathe, this can’t go on. I decide to tough it out, this isn’t going to get the better of me, and I resolve to stand up. The intense pain brings me down again. Frustration mounts. A moment of recognition snaps in my mind from years of mindfulness practice.  If I can’t tough it out what if I do the opposite? I gingerly get up on all fours noticing how my mind tenses in anticipation and how my body follows, creating an unpleasant sensation which my mind hugely dislikes and tenses more. I’m back in child again, not frustrated this time but curious.

I attempt to rise again, this time consciously letting the tension release, Bandhas and Ujjayi gradually inflating my body like a limp balloon. Yes, the sensations are intense, but I’m capable of more than I thought and although I know it is painful, for the most part it doesn’t hurt. I manage one salutation, so heavily modified its unrecognisable and I return to bed. Each of the next few days I manage to double the number of salutations, Come day six I'm due to start a five day intensive practice and adjustment workshop with John Scott. My initial hopes of expanding and extending my own practice, particularly my limited backbend, seem in shreds.

As I walk with exaggerated care down the street to the venue I rue the fact that I can barely do 30% of my usual practice. I declare my injury and am invited to just do what I can; advice I have often given students of mine now seems such a bitter pill. I become my own harsh judge and critic and my practice becomes more limited and restricted. After two days I remember the first steps to recovery on the floor of my bathroom. I spend the next three practising what I can and continually releasing tension.

My recovery continues over the next two months. After seven weeks I can teach without feeling a sense of restriction. By the end of week eleven all sense of limitation from the injury has ceased. In this period I have completely re-thought how I teach and the real cause of limitation in my body.
 
What followed over the next couple of years disassembled and rebuilt all that I thought I understood. What remains now, looks outwardly similar to what stood before, but is radically different. Even my desire to reduce everything to its essence has been rocked by the simplicity that now drives my practice.
 
In essence, key to this practice are the Bandhas, Ujjayi breath and the commitment to balance, both physically and mentally. Moola Bandha and Uddhiyana Bandha are located at what I consider to be the centre of gravity of the body. If the rest of my body responds in balance, the movement of these physical Bandhas relative to contact with the ground (earth element) changes my body shape.

The commitment to balance ensures that to remain in equilibrium some parts of the body will fall and others rise. There is never a need to lift, gravity will do all of the work. In the same way as an old fashioned kitchen scales never has to lift the lighter pan. Whilst this analogy is too simplistic for some postures it contains the essence of what I’m trying to describe.  Part of the ‘effort’ of yoga becomes keeping balance, the equivalent of a well oiled pivot on the scales, so that my body can respond to the smallest of changes created by the movement of Bandha.

The story becomes more interesting once I realise that the same response is present with the energetic Bandha, and that the use of mind's intention and attention can have an equal and at times greater effect on my body and mind. Physical tension can obstruct this as well as obscure the subtle effects of the Bandhas. So another part of the ‘effort’ of the practice also becomes releasing unessential physical and mental tension, tension I create through my tendency to push and then resist as I move and maintain one posture after another.

Where does this push and resist come from?  In a rare moment of insight I see my impatience with what is, as my mind declares a preference, and it’s not for where I am. When I allow myself to be guided by the Bandhas, Ujjayi breath and the commitment to balance, rather than strive to achieve a preferred posture my mind is momentarily emptied of the sense of involvement and achievement. The feeling of ‘I’ and ‘mine’ does not cast a shadow over the experience, alignment appears, the mind and body settles. The concurrent feeling of lightness, ease and a soft strength brings a real sense of completeness, nothing more need be done, it is full, perfect, nourishing.  In this moment, there is no doubt this is the best I can be right now, a flawed perfection.
 
Am I deluding myself?  How can I trust this experience? Each time I work this way it is accompanied by surprise and an uncomplicated joy. The posture has seemingly come about without my direct involvement, a sense of witnessing rather than ownership of the experience. I glimpse the very best of myself by stepping out of the way, all limitations evaporate. My mind is satisfied and feels no need to hold onto the experience. There is no pride, because I didn’t do it. Only afterwards do I realise what I no longer have.
  
As with all simple things explanation feels clumsy and awkward. The beauty of what I try to describe lies in the fact that it can be tasted by anyone and I can only encourage you to ‘taste’ it for yourself.
 
Keep smiling through 2017.

​Hugh