—Geshe Kelsang Gyatso - “Transform Your Life” (via sydshine)
(Source: dancingdakini, via sydshine)
—#yogainjuries
Something I’m always forgetting to do is set an intention at the start of my practice. I crawl out of bed, shock myself with the bathroom light and eventually stumble into the studio thinking “just breathe and raise your arms.”
In led vinyasa, a teacher reminds you to set your intention, to pause and think about your inner world. But in mysore, I’m usually not awake enough to remember. What I’ve noticed is without that moment to pause and think about why I’m practicing in the first place, yoga becomes another thing on the to-do list. Not to say that setting an intention and staying focused on it is easy when you’ve got your arms under your thighs and all you really want to do is be done with a pose, but every once in a while when it does come back to mind, what seemed like work becomes effortless, even gracious.
My shoulders drop, my heart lifts and I RELAX; something that I probably won’t have another chance to do for the next 10-12 hours before I’m back home. The practice itself becomes so much easier, my bundhas seem to contract without me even thinking about it and floating just kind of happens on it’s own.
It begs the question: what else in my life do I consider difficult at the onset, and blind myself from the chance to be grateful for the challenge?
—Woody Allen (via amypriyayoga)
Hey there, it’s me again. Your friendly alternative medicine lab rat.
As you may have noticed, I’ve got a trigger point from stress, etc in my trapezius. Acupuncture and massage have both helped it, but neither therapy has succeeded in really rid of the knot. The pain always comes back, and lately it’s been more and more acute.
A week of vipasana won’t fit in my calendar, so as I meditate towards the root of the pain I’m also looking for a way to manually fix it. Enter, Rolfing.
My most skeptical coworker brought Rolfing to my attention as one of the only alternative therapies heralded by his mom, who is a physical therapist. In her words, it’s the only thing she’s ever seen actually create lasting, positive change.
The key word there is ‘lasting.’ While I’m not looking for a magic pill to swallow that will fix my issues, I know that I can’t get to a future without shoulder pain without a jump start. Yoga has helped a TON to reduce a lot of my daily discomfort, but this shoulder issue persists. No amount of stretching has ever even gotten near the pain.
Rolfing works in a set series of 10 sessions of deep (some say masochistically painful) tissue manipulation that works to thin the connective tissue that pulls our posture out of alignment. The 10 sessions are meant to re-align your body post injury and set it into a new pattern that daily living will help maintain. And at $160 a pop, the idea of a finish line sounds pretty good to my wallet.
So here’s to a trial run next Tuesday.
It’s baaaa—-aack. My neck hurts again on the left side, at the base of my skull and also deep in my shoulder.
I practiced 3x this week, every other day and only rode my bike once. I changed my work seating to be more ergonomic, and I’ve had a pretty stress free week. So what the hell?
Am I yanking my neck when I come up in garbha pindasana? Am I hurting it in chaturanga? Am I releasing years of stress by finally getting it to relax? It doesn’t hurt during practice, but it sure as hell hurts now. I don’t know if I should get a massage, or if I should go back to acupuncture, or both. Anyone have any suggestions?
Consciousness is unfolded in each individual. Clearly, it’s shared between people as they look at one object and verify that it’s the same. So any high level of consciousness is a social process. There may be some level of sensorimotor perception that is purely individual, but any abstract level depends on language, which is social. The word, which is outside, evokes the meaning, which is inside each person.
Meaning is the bridge between consciousness and matter. Any given array of matter has for any particular mind a significance. The other side of this is the relationship in which meaning is immediately effective in matter. Suppose you see a shadow on a dark night. If it means “assailant,” your adrenaline flows, your heart beats faster, blood pressure rises, and muscles tense. The body and all your thoughts are affected; everything about you has changed. If you see that it’s only a shadow, there’s an abrupt change again.
…meaning is being! So any transformation of society must result in a profound change of meaning. Any change of meaning for the individual would change the whole because all individuals are so similar that it can be communicated.
—David Bohm, physicist (via thequietwalk)
OR, maybe I was feeling a million things at once because of PMS. Men think they are alone in their confusion about why we act so insane once a month, but they are not. It is just as weird on the inside of the crazy train.
I’m always in conflict about how to practice during my moon cycle. Unfortunately my practice hasn’t been regular enough to move my cycle in time with the moon day yet, so I can’t get a two-fer there. The reason I end up taking a day off, beyond the days that are just too painful is because of how strange it feels to contract my bandhas—it’s not painful, but it feels… kind of wrong. Like trying to turn a river up a hill. And from my understanding of apna, that is essentially what I’m doing.
It’s a bummer, because I had managed to get myself into the studio this morning even though I was exhausted. Ever since the winter, my willpower to shove myself out of bed when the alarm goes off has been faltering at best. It’s helped that my boyfriend has started setting his own alarm for 6:50, so I can’t sleep in without interruption anymore, but making it happen is still hard. I remembered this morning that the reason it’s still consistently hard for me to feel awake is in part because I still haven’t forced myself through a couple of painful weeks of getting up and going every day. And with my insides rioting, I hope I’ll be in a state to continue my ‘streak’ tomorrow.
It’s not news that we all have many versions of our selves. There’s a work self, an at home self, an out with the friends self, and even different selves that go with our different friends. Some bring out our best qualities, others bring out our more self destructive qualities.
Lately in my meditation, I’ve felt all of these versions of myself rushing around, running back and forth past one another in a frenzied race. They’re like tiny psychological atoms, incompatible and trapped, on the verge of voilent combustion. Simultaneously, I’ve had a really hard time getting motivated for more than a short burst about something that I used to really enjoy, and even crankily rejected the things I know I’ll be happy doing without any real reason at the heart of my irritation.
My nearest guess is that as I inch closer to turning 30, my subconscious is playing a reel of everyone I thought I’d be, or who I tried to be in an effort to reconcile them into who I’m turning out to be. Some of them are having to make concessions to one another, shrinking down or combining into new molecules of spirituality, ethics, love, motivation and perspective. It’s a chaotic process, and there is a lot of emotional spill over. I wake up exhausted a lot of mornings, no matter how long I’ve slept kind of bored and disinterested in the day ahead. That boredom of course leads me to feel a bit anxious and angry at myself for my lack of gratitude and my indulgent attitude towards time.
Maybe I need a break, a vacation— but somehow I don’t think this is going to disappear so easily. Has anyone else gone through a similar transition?
This was what my accupuncturist said to me last night when I went in to see about sharp pain in my neck and shoulder that showed up out of nowhere on Sunday morning.
I spent Sunday unable to turn my head to the left, and although mysore on Monday and Tuesday definitely helped to relax it, by the end of the work day, the pain was back and I decided to go ahead and make an appointment. I’m glad I did, because the trigger point in my trapezius was inflamed, and about the size of a walnut.
When she put in the needles, my muscles jumped and ached, releasing everything that was caught in their tension. I left sore, but the knots were absolutely gone. I stayed home from Mysore on Dr’s orders, and enjoyed a little more of some of the best sleep I’ve had in months.
It’s amazing how a treatment like that can set right so many months of stress and bad posture, but what I’m really wondering is how I can prevent that from happening again. I’ve recently started to meditate a little at night, and combined with regular yoga and cycling to work, I feel like a different person.
But all of that activity doesn’t take care of the self induced stress. I hold my shoulders up by my ears without even realizing it most of the time, like someone who’s afraid they’re about to be smacked on the head. There’s no over night treatment for those insecurities, so I’ll consider it part of a longer journey of self-acceptance and grace. But I kind of wish there was a needle for that too.
