Mindfulness Yoga
Page 27
When ready to come out, lower the hands to in front of your heart, and then with full awareness, slowly lower the left foot to the floor, returning you to MOUNTAIN. When you come out of TREE, there may be some strong sensations that arise in the foot that you had been standing on. Notice how the tendency to want to avoid feeling these sensations may quickly follow. Recommit to watching and feeling what arises, using your breath as your base. What happens to the sensations? Like all conditioned phenomena, they are impermanent.
Repeat while standing on the other leg.
Modification 1:
If unsteady, you can try with your foot pressing below your knee on your inner shin, or even have your toes on the floor for some added balance assistance.
Modification 2:
Practice against a wall, with your right hand on the wall. Use the wall to steady yourself. Try to reach your left hand over your head. If this feels okay, try taking your right hand up too.
18. Locust Pose (Variations 2 and 3)
6-10 BREATHS, 1-3 REPETITIONS
Start by lying face down on your belly with your legs together and with your arms behind your back with your fingers clasped together.
Keep pressing your pubis, hips, thighs, and the tops of your feet into the ground and as you inhale, curl your head, shoulders, and upper chest up off the ground. Reach back through your clasped hands and, keeping the wrists in toward each other, lift them up off your back. As you continue to breathe in this posture, pay attention to how the breath moves in the body while also moving the body. After four breaths, extend out through your feet and let the legs rise up off the floor. Continue to breathe in this full posture and let the breath guide you in your effort. See how the varied sensations and thoughts are conditioned by the body and the breath. See how they change when the position of the body and the quality of the breath changes.
19. Bow Pose
6-12 BREATHS, 1-3 REPETITIONS.
Lying on your belly, bend your knees and take hold of you feet at the ankles, keeping your knees hip-width apart. Let the front of your body be relaxed. Open the lower back as your let the tailbone drop slightly toward the ground.
Then, as you inhale, press the tops of your feet into your hands and lift your thighs from the floor. Let this dual action of your legs assist your head, shoulders, and chest in lifting off from the ground. Try to avoid pulling with your arms. Honor your body and its range. If you feel tension in the lower back, don’t lift so high and keep some length between your buttocks and your lower back. How does the experience of this posture change over time?
When you’re ready, exhale down.
20. Child Pose
15-30 BREATHS
Press back into CHILD, with your sitting bones dropping into your heels. Your big toes should be touching, and your knees are slightly apart. Release your torso onto the tops of your thighs. Place your forehead on the ground and your arms alongside your legs. Make sure that your weight is moving back toward your heels and not on your neck and head by adjusting the distance between your knees. Release yourself fully into the posture and let the breath be natural. Where do you experience the breath? As you stay here, notice any changes in the qualities of the breath. Just letting the breath be cultivates calm as you rest in CHILD. Notice the quality of the mental state as you rest here.
Modification:
If your hips do not touch your heels, and you feel most of your weight in your upper body and head, lay your torso on a bolster or some blankets. This will support your torso and allow your head to come to the height of your hips.
21. Diamond Pose (Variation)
6-20 BREATHS
From CHILD, have your knees together and your ankles pressing in together with your toes tucked under as you sit back on your calves. Work to get your heels within the space between your sitting bones. Let the spine rise up strongly from the basin of the pelvis. The crown of the head reaches up. Your shoulders are relaxed down your back, and the chest is broad and lifted.
As you sit here, sensations may arise in your knees or ankles, but more likely at the toe joints. Be mindful of the quality of the sensations. Work with discomfort, but honor true pain. Notice reactivity and aversion, and let your breath bring you back to a pure awareness of the sensations. Drop the story line and just see. If you can find even a few breaths free of the tension of aversion and resistance, do you experience the sensations differently in any way at all?
Again, let your emphasis be on seeing how the sensations do not remain constant, but in fact continually change. What happens if you can really let go of personalizing the experience and just see the sensations as conditioned? Can you keep a sense of wonder and inquiry as you observe just what is actually happening, free from your mental constructions about the experience?
Release from here by drawing your legs out from under you.
22. Staff Pose
6-15 BREATHS
Sit with your legs together straight out in front of you. Press the back of your thighs, calves, and heels evenly into the ground while reaching out through your heels. Press your hands into the ground beside your hips as you lift the chest. This full-body static contraction will have a profound effect on where the breath is felt most as well as on the quality of the breath. See for yourself where you feel the breath. Is the breath more expansive or contractive in this deceptively dynamic posture?
What changes occur as you stay here?
23. One-Legged Forward Bend
10-25 BREATHS EACH SIDE
Starting from STAFF POSE, bend your right knee upward, sliding your right heel in toward your right sitting bone. Then open your right leg out to the side.
Reaching up through your arms and keeping lifted in your torso, ease forward and reach out for your left shin or foot. As you ground down through your legs, lift your chest forward and out over the left leg. Tilting the pelvis forward, hinging from the hips, let your sitting bones spread back and apart. Don’t pull, but go to your edge and notice any resistance you may feel in the back of the straight leg. You don’t need to get anywhere, but see if you can relax the resistance to being here. As we begin to settle down in the seated forward bends, the mind can either drift off in fantasy or begin to really spin out commentary. Just see what is happening. If you can stay aware, and with the breath as your home base, does the mind just naturally begin to release or let go?
When coming up from this forward bend, keep lengthening up and out as you inhale; then, exhaling, release the posture.
Repeat on the other side.
Modification:
If you are coming into this forward bend primarily from bending in the lower back and not from the hips, sit up on a blanket or two and keep extending the torso out over your straight leg. Stop when you feel the pelvis start to roll backward and round your lower back. You can support yourself here with your hands gently pressing into your shins.
24. Lord-of-the-Fishes Pose
10-15 BREATHS EACH SIDE
Bring your left leg into a simple cross-legged position, sliding it under your right thigh, so that your left heel comes to rest at the outside of your right hip. Then, cross your right foot over your left knee so that the sole of your right foot is firmly on the ground. Hug your right leg with your left arm just below the knee, and use your right hand to press into the ground behind your back so that you can extend your spine up as you ground your legs. Begin to twist to the right, using your left hand to aid the left side of your body in coming around to the right.
You can take your left arm to the outside of your right leg and press into the leg for added leverage, but let the twist rise naturally from the base of the spine upward. Let your head turn to the right at the end of the torso’s movement, and keep the neck relaxed. Don’t lead with your chin.
Stay present with your breath guiding you in your exploration of impermanence. For instance, you may find that after a few exhalations, you can move a bit deeper into the twist. Conversely, you may begin to feel the sensations grow
stronger, coaxing you into backing out a bit. Remember that “holding” a posture is just a concept. In fact, there is nothing to hold and all is process. From moment to moment, you are recreating the posture.
Release as you exhale and gently untwist.
Repeat on the other side.
Modification:
If your hips are tight, you may find that your pelvis and back are collapsed back as you cross your legs to set up for this twist. Try sitting up on several blankets so that you can establish the natural curvature of your spine in the starting position for this posture.
Then keep a sense of lifting up from the pelvis as you twist from the base of your spine upward. Using a block for your back hand will also help you from collapsing in this posture.
25. Seated Forward Bend
10-20 BREATHS
From STAFF POSE, reach out and grasp your feet or your shins. Soften your groins as your thighs roll slightly inward, sitting bones moving back and apart. Think more of lifting the torso out and over your legs and not so much about how far you get in the pose. Yes, the back will round, but let it round evenly, and not until you’ve folded from the hips first. Move the chest out over your legs by using the strength of your arms, bending your elbows up and out to the sides. Gaze toward your toes, until the chin comes to rest on the shin. Then turn the gaze within or onto your “third eye.”
As you surrender into the posture, keep your focus on the breath. Find that balance between working in a posture and giving yourself up to it. Don’t strain. What really happens as you stay here in the posture? Perhaps in getting familiar with the posture you may notice the mind sinking away into daydreaming. Or you may find yourself leaning into the future, looking forward to releasing from the forward bend and looking for the next thing. Keep coming back to just this, just here, and just now and see if ease and stability can be found where you are.
When coming out of this forward bend, inhale as you lift the heart up and out and then exhale as you release to the starting position
Modification:
We want to initiate this posture from being firmly grounded at the sitting bones and folding forward from the hips. If in STAFF POSTURE you cannot maintain the natural curvature of your lower back and feel it rounding out, then sit up on a blanket or two.
Keep the back lengthened and don’t worry about getting your head to your leg, but stay at your edge and allow the stretch to come from the back of your legs and your hips.
26. Reverse Plank
4-8 BREATHS
From STAFF POSE, place your hands on the floor behind your hips with the fingers pointing toward or away from your toes (you may want to alternate, as both positions have their merits). Inhaling, lift the pelvis up to the ceiling as you point the toes toward the floor. Keep the tailbone reaching toward your feet. Make sure your wrists are directly below your shoulders with your arms straight. Either keep your chin on your chest, or let the head release all the way back, supported by your upper back muscles.
This posture can often be the cause of much resistance. If this is so for you, place your attention on just what it is you are resisting and see if it isn’t also changing, impermanent, and not really a thing with which to struggle. Can you see the ceasing and letting go of the resistance? Keep your focus on the breath, and when you’re ready, exhale back down into the starting position.
27. Corpse Pose
5-15 MINUTES
Lie in CORPSE POSE, with your legs about 12-18 inches apart and your toes turned out. Your arms are at your sides, at least a few inches from the torso with your palms turned upward. First, just let your awareness rest wherever in your body you experience the breath. Remember, let go of the tendency to control or manipulate and just see for yourself what is happening now. Wherever you feel it, rest your attention there.
Stay with the sensations of the breath, the subtle increase of tension as you inhale, and then the release of the exhalation. After awhile, let your awareness expand to include your whole body. Let yourself open to and embrace all the sensations that may arise as you lie here. Look to see if the feeling tone is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Notice any tendency to hold on to pleasant experience, reject what may be unpleasant, or “zone out” in the absence of any particularly strong sensations.
Then, let awareness itself turn upon itself. What mental states are present? Remember that mental formations include what we normally think of as emotions, as well as fantasy, drowsiness, mindfulness, reasoning, judging. Noticing what is there, with no aversion or clinging, is our practice. Looking deeply into the mental formations, they liberate themselves as long as we do not feed them with our clinging and pushing away.
See how all is an endless stream of changing phenomena. With the body and mind dropping away, what remains?
28. Seated Meditation
5-40 MINUTES
Sit in any of the cross-legged asanas. Find your center by rocking side to side, and then lengthen the sides of your body from your hips up into your armpits. Make sure your shoulder blades are firmly supporting your upper back and that your lower back has its natural lumbar curve.
Beginning with the breath, let the mind rest with the arising and falling of the breath in the body. Once the mind is at least a little calmed, open the field of awareness to include all that arises, simply seeing the impermanent, ceaselessly changing nature of all phenomena: sensations, thoughts, feelings, emotions, images. Simply abide in the mindfulness.
When the yogini breathes in or breathes out and contemplates the essential impermanence or the essential fading away of clinging or cessation or letting go, she abides peacefully in the observations of the objects of mind in the objects of mind, persevering, fully awake, clearly understanding her state, gone beyond all attachment and aversion to this life. These exercises of breathing with Full Awareness belong to the fourth establishment of mindfulness, the objects of mind.
APPENDIX A:
THE SEVEN FACTORS OF AWAKENING
THE SEVEN FACTORS OF AWAKENING, known in Pali as sambhojjhanga and in Sanskrit as sapta-bodhyanga, are mindfulness, investigation of dharmas, energy, joy, ease, concentration, and letting go. The word bodhyanga (bhojjhanga) is a compound word. Bodhi means “awakening” or “enlightenment” and comes from the root buddh-, which means, “to wake up,” and is the same root from which Buddha comes. Anga literally means “limb.” So the Seven Factors of Awakening can also be called the Seven Limbs of Awakening.
The Buddha discovered, as he realized awakening under the bodhi tree, that the potentialities of these seven factors are already present in each and every one of us, but we simply do not see it yet. The seven factors of awakening are not only a description of the characteristics or attributes of awakening but also describe the process of awakening. Thinking of the limbs of a tree, the tree of yoga, we see how each limb grows longer, stronger, and sends out new branches continuously. Each of the Factors of Awakening are growing all the time and are not to be thought of as static conditions of being. Enlightenment itself then is not something that happens once and for all, but it too is a process that develops and evolves over time.
The first and core limb of the tree of yoga is mindfulness. This is the practice of continuously remembering to stay present, not losing ourselves in forgetfulness of where we are, what we are doing, and whom we are with. Mindfulness is always arising in relationship—to ourselves, including our breath, body movements, and feelings, and to our surroundings and all that we experience physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Our whole practice as discussed in this book is to cultivate the potentiality of mindfulness through our asana practice, through Mindfulness Yoga. Using the Full Awareness of Breathing as the vehicle for our mindfulness, we practice the Four Foundations of Mindfulness in order to cultivate the other Factors of Awakening.
Investigation of dharmas (Sanskrit: dharma-pravichaya; Pali: dhamma-vicaya) is the second factor. The word dharmas in this instance means all phenomena. All phenomena in turn,
means every aspect of our lived experience. Absolutely nothing is rejected. This is especially important for those of us who may have acquired the notion that only certain subjects are spiritual, and so if we are feeling lust or anger or anxiety—or any other such states—we must somehow suppress that as ignoble or unworthy. With steadfast mindfulness, we turn our attention to whatever is there so that we can cultivate the deep penetrative understanding of its true nature, its causes and conditions.