the Yoga of Kindness

Kindness is a component of any spiritual practice and is part of living your Yoga practice as well. Of course, in our Yoga practice, we learn to ignore the voices in our head, the ones usually put there by others, that say we're not being kind enough or that we're bound by a rule that defines kindness in a way that "counts", and which denies the presence of the self,

While we are making good karma when we are acting kind, we aren't looking to "score points".

Kindness loosely means giving to someone in need. Need is a loosely-defined word. Think of a time when you were extremely angry at the world and and some random person was nice to you, exactly when you needed it to happen.

Kindness comes in all sizes...

Such acts are powerful due to sincerity, not size. Maybe you were carrying a bunch of stuff through a doorway and you about to drop all of it on the floor, and someone held the door for you so you could get through, preventing an aggravating you certainly wanted to avoid. Maybe someone gave you a ride when you were stranded,

Whatever the act of kindness you witnessed or received, it made you feel alive again and reminded you that you weren't alone...

A gift of a flower, a hug or even just a good compliment can change a whole day and change the whole course of life for a person. To know that you have such power to change is in itself a great gift to you, and makes it easy to give without need of a gift in return.

Shanti Om!

Yamas of Yoga...Ahimsa-Non-harming

Deva Primal chants the mantra of ahimsa

lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu

"may all beings everywhere be happy and free"

Ahimsa is probably the most talked-about of the yamas because it is easier to define it as a concrete concept. Ahimsa literally means "non-harming", but is better understood as non-violence. Of course, this is where a bot of abstract thinking is necessary.

Violence has many forms and faces; the biggest example of violence when it comes to practicing Yoga is violence toward the self. 

We're all familiar with the term "beating yourself up". In our quest to be good, we become very critical of our own moral actions. We als may push ourselves too hard when working out because we don't want to let ourselves be "wimpy" or whatever other term we might use to say we're slacking. These are two ways we hold grudges against ourselves just as we might hold grudges against others.

If you can't forgive someone for something they've done against you, or if you can't forgive yourself for something you've done, this is an act of violence because it pushes love away.

Gia My Yoga

One of the most-popular ways yogis have sought to practice ahimsa in recent decades is to not eat meat. This idea seems simple but can be tough. Not everyone who has tried a vegetarian or vegan diet has managed to avoid health problems. To have a diet that makes you unhealthy means you are harming yourself. 

We can take a simpler view of ahimsa by simply seeking to avoid being unnecessarily hurtful toward ourselves and toward others. This doesn't mean lying as opposed to truth telling, but it may mean waiting until the right time to tell someone something. We can also avoid needless expression, such as reminding someone of a mistake they are already aware that they made and that you know they are already working to correct. 

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Sources:

Gia My Yoga

Mind Body Green

Insight State

Yamas of Yoga-Satya

The second Yama of Yoga is Satya which translates in English to "truthfullness"

The famous, former US House Speaker Tip O'Neill is credited with saying:

"Always tell the truth, that way you have a lot less to remember"

Or something very similar. Of course, O'Neill was speaking with reference to politics, not Yoga. But as Yoga means the connection and union of all forces and all things in proper measure, we can contemplate the Speaker's quote quite handily.

Former House SPeaker Tip O'Neill, right, shakes hands with former President Ronald Reagan. While O'Neill was a harsh critic of Reagan, he became famous for working across the political aisle to broker successful and fruitful political compromises.

Being truthful protects us from being roiled in scandal that can come from lying; scandals can range from political issues at work to conflicts with clients in business, and problems with friends and family.

Often, what makes it tough to be truthful is the timing of a specific situation. Sometimes, it is more proper to delay the truth in order to avoid doing harm, especially in a truly grave situation. This tactic can also backfire, say, if we lie to someone and later tell the truth while also saying:

How often has someone told us: "I lied becasue I didn't want to hurt your feelings" ?

It's happened at some point, to each of us. We've either done it to someone or had it done to us, or both.

This tactic will always backfire, because you've already hurt the person's feelings by lying, and by trying to do right by truth telling at a later time, you hurt that person double fold.

It's easy to learn from mistakes involving other people, quite simply, because after making this type of mistake, people react and want to push you away. You get lonely and you feel like a schmuck and don't ever want to feel that way again.

So what does this have to do with your Yoga practice? Without digging deeper into dogmatic moral contexts, let's look inward to ourselves.

Without other people to scrutinize our thoughts and actions, it gets tougher to tell how truth telling can be beneficial or negatively consequential.

The tenet of truth is to be honest with yourself, always. When dealing with your inner self, you need only be able to forgive yourself and love yourself. There's no timing involved with that; there are no political or social situations that are at stake when we are dealing with our own selves only.

Be honest with yourself and you won't create situations of denial that cloud our ability to see who and what we really are. When we see our true selves, and act in honest accordance to that knowledge, then we don't make clouded decisions.

When we don't deny who we really are, we are better to see who we are really talking to and interacting with, and we're far less likely to speak or act in a manner that distorts the truth.

Be truthful to yourself, and you'll have less trouble seeing the appropriate boundaries of truth with respect to to others with whom we share our world.

Namaste

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Author and Yoga Instructor Vincent Gerbino 

The Yamas of Yoga-Aparigraha

Study the Yamas of Yoga-Aparigraha

Since the Yamas of Yoga are applicable to our whole lives, we don't worry too much about the order here. Yama number five, Aparigraha, will be one that we as humans will constantly revisit. Aparigraha means non-possessiveness. Hmm....now this is an idea that can create a few different arguments!

Possessiveness, and the seemingly-noble pursuit of non-possessiveness is always a touchy subject. We can be possessive of material things, and we can be possessive of other people.

Sometimes, when we're possessive of people, it,s a control thing, other times, we feel insecure about ourselves and use other people to fill the void. Generally, we learn to temper our possessiveness of people, and of things by observing our own mistakes. That's a necessary part of developing wisdom and enlightenment.

Possessiveness of a concept, or of a perceived conception of what is ideal is the real challenge with the Yama of Aparigraha.

Holding onto an idea, or a concept you create in your head is a different, more-powerful form of greed that is as elusive as it is obvious. Maybe we see someone else in Yoga class who can do an asana in what we call "perfect" form, with perfect meaning "like the person in the Yoga magazine.

There's nothing wrong with seeing a picture of someone doing a pose and saying: "wow, I want to do that!" But we need to remember not to be too greedy when giving our own selves credit for the effort put fourth, no matter how our pose looks.

Even more important is not being too greedy with our sense of receiving goodness...stated more simply, if your heart can't be allowed to feel and receive goodness, it means we're not giving goodness to ourselves.

What on Earth does this have to do with doing a Yoga pose, like I was just talking about? Well, let's face it: stretching in any pose generally feels good. We release stress and open the chakras and start to feel energized at the same time we start to feel relaxed.

We have to be kind enough to ourselves to let that good stuff be felt. Being kind to ourselves is the opposite of being greedy with our own affection.

The same concept can be applied to people-not being too greedy to see the good being given to us-we'll never feel it if we shut it out. We can also start to see more goodness in our current net worth, whatever that may be, and

Says spiritual teacher Deborah Adele: "An unhealthy need to acquire material things drives discontent that’s similar to clinging to things you have...whenever we become possessive, we are in turn possessed”.

Blessings!

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Sources:

Deborah Adele Spiritual Yoga Teacher and author of The Yamas & Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice

The Yoga Sutras of Pantajali

How to Succeed in Any Balancing Pose

Learn to Fall

This is something I tell every Yoga client in every class, no matter what. I don't mean hold the pose until you fall over. What you need to do do is practice falling out of the pose-properly. Take a pose such as Salamba Sirsasana, or supported headstand.

The obvious, and sage advice, is to practice the pose on a wall. The wall will prevent a major accident; but many students become physically capable of getting into the pose and holding it without needing the wall, but hesitate to move away from it. The issue they have is that they have not intentionally tought themselves how to fall.

What one needs to do is practice repeatedly dropping the feet back to the floor-a.k.a. falling properly. Also, one must talk herself through the whole process of movement.

Talk yourself through the movement

Talking yourself through the process of moving into a balancing pose, and falling properly out of the pose isn't any different than doing so in any other pose. You move slow enough that your conscious mind, and your consious heart have time to "see" the movement by way of feeling it. Before even trying a balancing pose, take a moment in a more-basic pose, such as Virabhadrsana-Warrior pose.

In Warrior pose, we distribute our body weight between our feet by adjusting every muscle from the toes, ankles and legs to the torso, right up through our shoulders and arms.

Go barefoot more often

For you to have good balance, your feet need to be able to assume their natural shape. Wearing shoes conmpresses the feet. The bones are pushed together and the muscles and tendons get squeezed out of shape and can't fully function. The resulting effect is instability in your stance and your walk, which will also lead to problems of the ankles, knees and hips. Even flat sandals such as flip flops can cause some drag on the soles of the feet and result in restricted movement.

The solution: go barefoot when you can. Whenyou get home from work, get out of your shoes and socks. If you have high atrches, you'll have to build a tolorance for being barefoot and you'll feel fatigue more quickly. You might need to put on your Birkenstocks or running shoes after you've been barefoot for a while.

Going barefoot will help most directly with standing balancing poses, but will help with all balancings, including handstands and arm balances. Tight muslces on one end of the body always affect the body elsewhere.

Danica Patrick-Better Known For Yoga?

Danica Patrick maybe best known for auto racing, but lately, she's made a bigger splash doing yoga on a boat. While the boat included a crew of partygoers, Danica's yoga is as serious as her racing.

Posted viaInstagram by Danica Patrick (left, in Wheel Pose) with Katylin Sweet (right, in Camel Pose)

Maybe its that the NASCAR crowd isn't so into Yoga, and that's why Danica gets so much attention. It doens't hurt that she did her latest yoga poses for the public in a bikini. She's posted pletny of Instgram pics of her posing in, well, regular Yoga clothes. 

She was described earlier this year as "rediculously good at yoga" by USA Today, and as far as the physical practice goes, the proof is in the pose pics. Of course, any practitioner of yoga knows there's more to it, and so does Danica, when she talks of breathign exercises being essential to her yoag practice. 

“Breath is the one thing that I really do use from yoga in the race car,” she said. “When things get tense it’s in through the nose, out through the mouth. Inevitably it calms your heart rate down. It calms you down. I by all means use breath in the car, which is something that I’ve used in yoga,” 

-Danica Patrick to USA Today Sports, Ferbuary, 2016.

She'll no doubt add the Yoga helps her avoid the aches and pains that come from all the sitting and driving.....Namaste!