The Cave Behind the Waterfall

Rest yourself Inside
behind the veil of thoughts

Sit in the glow of the Cave
behind the waterfall

Dry and calm

Watch the descending current without judgment
Without taking pride in the water
Without scolding the water
Without wishing there was no water

Move within

Not easy
Nor is childbirth
Nor any process of Becoming

Most are closer to water than the Cave
Cold & drenched, hand scratching head

That’s okay

From beneath the water read the Sign Post:
"Move within. Now. Love you, Your Divinity."

Trust the moments of warmth
the glimpses of Light
the echoes of Silence
the hints of the Heart

Step out of the water

Some days very hard
Some days easier
Some days dry and warm
Some days wet all day

That's okay

Pratice watching the ‘lonely’, the ‘hurt’,
the ‘fear’, the ‘jealousy’,
the ‘right’, the ‘wrong’,
the ‘good’, the ‘bad’,
the ‘she’, the ‘he’,
the ‘I’, the ‘me’...

Endless drops

Watch and breathe...without judgment

...or maybe there is judgment...

That's okay

Practice again

Keep practicing
moving inwards
recede completely
into the Fire of the Heart

The Great Surrender

Upon returning from an 8 day "Raise Your Vibration" yoga journey with Desiree Rumbough at Kirpalu, this poem whispered itself to me.


softly landing
in my own skin
again tender

after so much clinging
gripping the bit
controlling
but not controlling

my breath
lays me to rest
in the openness
of my own heart

nothing to fight here
not even my own self

a smooth baby-body
asleep in mommy's arms
in daddy's hands

today i am baby
i am mommy
i am daddy

i lull myself sweetly
towards the great surrender
that precedes freedom

The Mind is Like a Dixie Cup

A young Krishna is playing with his friends, eating dirt, as boys will do. His mother catches him and insists that he spit out the rocks. When he opens his mouth wide she peers in and catches a glimpse of the entire universe...with in him! Stars, suns, moons, boundless space. At the sight of The Everything with in him, Krishna's mother momentarily passes out. The mind is like a Dixie cup. It can’t hold that ocean.

This is story paints such a delightful image of a foundational aspect of "Yoga". "Yoga" is the state being where nothing's missing. The state of yoga is a cellular recognition that every planet, every star, the building blocks of every living thing exist within each of us. Intricate systems work together inside our being. Water, electricity, waves, and powerful vibrations animate our every moment, our alive-ness. Nothing’s missing.

Of course, we will forget the grandeur, the twinkling of the stars inside, the multitudes of universes inside us. Part of the human experience is forgetting the miracle of The Everything of which we are composed.

That is why I practice yoga daily. The practice helps me move beyond the waxed paper border of my mind into the greater space within. Whether it's asana, mediation, pranayama...the practices help me touch the space my mind can't reach. In this way it brings me into a direct experience with The Everything...if even for just a moment.

Preaching to the Choir

Whenever possible I climb to the top of the nearest mountain or speed bump to declare my ecstatic love for this practice called ‘yoga’. Yoga brought me back to my own Self - like a shepherd to her sheep. In the style of ‘Amazing Grace’, I was lost and then I was found.

When yoga found me I had long intellectually understood that I was composed of divine intelligence - the same divine intelligence that makes waves in the oceans, brings about spring after winter and designs animals of every color, shape and size. I understood with my head the miracle of my being, but that didn’t stop me from making very poor, selfish, fearful, hurtful, self-defeating decisions over and over and over again. My understanding of my own Grace-nature had not integrated into my cells, my heart, my breath or my every waking moment. Not even close. Bridging that understanding from my head to my heart occurred (and occurs daily) via my yoga practice on and off the mat. Yoga integrates what we know with our brains with the boundless life-force energy of the heart.

It is for this reason that I will share this practice with others for as long as I live. The practice is a direct extension cord to the Love in our hearts, the Love in every living vibration on the planet. Plus it just feels so dang good to play and breathe and squirm and find stillness again on the mat. So I teach yoga as a means of giving back the greatest gifts I have been given by this practice - health, consciousness, self-reflection, calmness, peace, vibrancy, and, oh yeah, Universal Love.

I am madly in love with the human race. Many of my friends can not fathom this possibility. And, let’s face it, as a race we are not always so lovable. We do things that hurt each other. We say things that sting like daggers. We are fallible, angry, violent, cruel and selfish. But, somehow, the practice of yoga gives one X-ray vision of sorts. With this vision we are able to see through the fallible ‘ways’ of man and woman, right into the root of the root of the heart of the matter that gave birth to the anger, violence, cruelty and selfishness. It’s a radical gift to see through the hurt to the heart. And that is the gift that keeps on giving in the practice of yoga. Sure, your hamstrings will elongate, your backpain will go away, your self-doubt will finally step to the back of the stage - but even cooler - you will learn to see love where previously it was hidden. It’s a crazy, beautiful, thrilling, exhausting, liberating thing. It’s like going to the best optometrist on the planet. Dr. yoga, yo.

So from the top of every mountain let yoga ring.

The Sky is Waiting

Come fly.
Leave your left brain.
Bring your heart,
your trust,
your quite eyes and ears.
Leave your fear,
your no's,
your cant's,
your wont's.
Bring your wonder.
Bring your laughter.
Bring the wings of your breath.
Come fly.
The sky is waiting...

The Cat in the Hat & Resistance in the Body

Like Dr. Seuss’s book, Oh The Places You’ll Go, perhaps some day I’ll write a book for my yoga students titled Oh The Obstacles You’ll Meet.

In class I often refer to these obstacles as “resistance”. When I first began the yoga asana practice I met the resistance of my hamstrings, my hips, and my spine. I met the resistance of neglected and denied emotions. I met the resistance of my self-doubt, the twisted knot of my lack of self-compassion, and the exhaustion of an unloved body. I met the resistance of a chronically dense sensation in my heart-center. I met the resistance of an over-active inner-critic. I met the resistance of an over-active perfectionist. Oh the Resistance I Met.

In the face of resistance on the yoga mat I have found the following questions to be very powerful and empowering tools: How am I meeting this resistance? Am I meeting this resistance with a fight - with my fists clenched, teeth gripped and shallow breath? Can I meet this resistance with its opposite - with a patient exhalation, a soft loose jaw and with loving compassion directed to the area of resistance?

Consider the lives and choices of Martin Luther King Jr, Mother Theresa and Gandhi. These individuals lives reflect the possibility (and power) in meeting resistance with something other than...more resistance. They met life's inevitable resistances with non-violence, calm, compassion and intelligence. Their lives teach me that since resistance is inevitable how I handle resistance is my only choice. Staying tuned to how I confront obstacles and choosing a love-based response to them is one way to practice living yoga off the mat.

Oh the Compassion We'll Cultivate.

The Un-Nameable Something

A dear friend, Virginia, commented before class today, "So about all these technical manipulations of the body - arm bones back, inner spiral here, outer spiral there, tail bone in - something feels lacking. After all those manipulations something still feels lacking."

And the other day a dancer friend reflected, "You can be the most technically brilliant ballet dancer, but boring as hell to watch if you don't have that 'un-nameable something'".

And in less poetic terms I can offer this: Yes, we can do everything (on or off) the mat just "right" (just like our teachers or parents or bosses tell us) and we can still be f-ing miserable. We can still be dense, stuck and stale, even after having followed every little commandment and order of operations.

In the Anusara method, founded by John Friend, I find a response to “there’s something missing.” The first principle of alignment in Anusara yoga is “Open to Grace”. In my experience Opening to Grace is an expression for quieting the ego, the thinker, the do-er. Opening to Grace is a state of surrender, receptivity and luminescence that unfurls inside of us. To Open to Grace is to acknowledge with our inner most being the revelatory aspect of Spirit that has made itself known by our very existence. And it is from this state that we begin to witness our breath. It is from this state that the breath begins to inspire physical movement of “arm bones back, inner spiral here, outer spiral there...”

Virginia is so very right. The physical manipulations are but loud dense actions without first Opening to Grace, the ‘un-nameable something’, that I just gave a name to.

We Are Pacha Mama

Evan and I just returned from our back country journey in Big Bend...

When over-looking a 2000 ft cliff, my chattering ego-mind vanishes. All I am left with is the visceral knowing that I am a part of something greatly larger than myself, a part of Pacha Mama, Mother Earth. It is so easy to forget our inner connectivity to Nature in our day to day city lives. In so many ways we have constructed a world of "comfort" that separates us from Nature - we drive instead of walk, we eat in chairs instead of under canopies, we visually consume television instead of the nightly sunset. In detaching ourselves from Nature, we have forgotten that we ourselves are Nature.

Funny how the clickity-clatter of the mind can often find a way of muffling this knowing, replacing it with rowdy, clammering tales about the "weighty chore" of filing taxes, the "stagnant frustration" of Lamar traffic, or the "looming" skyscrapers of post-moving boxes that must be tended to in every room of our home.

But the beauty of merging with Nature is that we come to recognize that labels like "weighty", "frustration", and "fussy" belong to our over-active minds. These labels do not belong to Nature. (But isn't our mind part of Nature, one might ask...) When consciousness merges with the Nature, the mind's suffocating labels disappear. This merging with Nature, this smoothing of my mind's waves (vritis), is the driving force of my yoga asana practice - another way to merge with Nature.

Just as Nature smooths the waves of our thoughts, reminding us that there is another mode of existing that is not purely mental, so too does yoga return us to a state free of heady-tinkering. Like Big Bend National Park, the breath too soaks the jars of my thoughts and peels back my labels, reminding me that I am a part deeply interconnected to the Whole. I am liquid. I am air. I am the cycle of life and death. I am the seasons. I am animal. I come from the Mystery. I will return to the Mystery. I am a peon. I am a miracle. I am both insignificant and divine.

Less labels, more freedom. Less labels, more flexibility. Less labels, more peace. Less vritis, more Truth.

On our last night Evan and I were humbled spectators of what seemed to be a never ending sunset. Pinks, oranges, yellows spread out across the omnidome of sky doppled with clouds and graced by falcons. Though cold winds whipped across the upper cliffs of the South Rim, our senses were muted by the grandeur of what surrounded us...in that which we are all interconnected.

As I return to Austin, the city, my life as a yoga teacher...may I remember to inhale and let Pacha Mama sweep through me. May my daily practice and this breath hear and now serve to remind me of the Nature I am...of the Nature we all are.