Manaia Wellbeing

Yoga, Health and Wellbeing in Westport, Buller, Rangiora and North Canterbury

Coming to Stillness

By

Head-to-Knee Pose

(Variations on Janu Sirsasana)

By Donna Farhi

Many years ago during a particularly intense period of asana practice I asked one of my teachers what she thought I needed to work on. I expected to receive another list of advanced postures, but after a long pause she said, “You need to learn how to be simple.” This was not the answer I had hoped for! I could certainly work my way through an exhausting regimen of postures, but could I be still for ten minutes? Could I take pleasure in the simple act of sitting, standing, or lying down? I had already begun to notice that my natural inclination in asana practice was drawing me toward stillness and into meditation. But unable to discern the difference between complacency and containment, after sitting quietly for a few minutes I would rally myself once again into action. On to the next posture! Gradually, as I began to trust my own inner prompting, my practice did indeed become more simple and I began to spend as much time in meditation as in asana. [Read more…]

Virabhadrasana II (Warrior Pose II) – by Donna Farhi

By

  By gracefully yielding to gravity, you can meet challenging poses with efficiency and ease.

 At the heart of all yoga philosophy lies the premise that suffering arises from a mistaken perception that we are separate. Whether we feel separate from other human beings, or separate from the trees we walk under, the rocks we walk upon, or the creatures that walk, fly, swim, and crawl around us, yoga insists that this separation is an illusion. The life force is intrinsic to all things, and any separation we feel from anything is a separation from that ever-renewing source of sustenance. Almost all of us have felt the veil of this false notion lift at some time in our lives and experienced the feeling of goodness and wholesomeness that comes when we feel ourselves to be a part of everything. And most of us have found that this feeling of wellness and happiness rarely arrives through pushing and pulling and molding ourselves into who we think we ought to be. Instead, this feeling of oneness, of being happy for no particular reason, seems to arise when we simply accept the moment and ourselves just as we are. As Swami Venkatesananda tells us in his translation of the second verse of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, “Yoga happens . . . .” Of course, Venkatesananda goes on to name the conditions in which yoga occurs, but I think “happens” is the key word in his translation. It implies that the state we call yoga can’t be forced. [Read more…]

The Window In: Following the Breath – by Donna Farhi

By

“Everything that moves, breathes, opens and closes Lives in the Self.”
Mundaka Upanishad 2.1. Translated by Eknath Easwaran

It begins when we are still in the womb – an expanding, condensing rhythm, threaded together by moments of pause. It is the pulse of the universe, and from the moment of conception we are that. While we are in our mother’s body, the breath is an interior movement, a process of shimmering cellular respiration. At the moment of birth, when we first breathe into the lungs, we are initiated into the family of things. Suddenly the world is in us and we are in the world. We draw the breath inside the body, for a moment it becomes us, and we exhale a part of what has become us back into the world. While we are young we tend to breathe with the kind of complete freedom and ease that is an expression of our innocence and fearlessness. As we age and lose some of that innocence, rubbing up against life’s challenges, we unconsciously shut down, and we do this first and foremost by constricting our breath.

For the most part the process of breathing is an unconscious one, which is just as well. None of us would like to stay up all night reminding ourselves to breathe in and out, nor would we have much room for creative thought during the day if we did. But when our breath becomes unconsciously restricted and held, then it can be useful to make this involuntary process conscious. In yoga practice we do this so we can become aware of our most basic level of aliveness, and as our practice progresses we use a heightened awareness of the breath to train the mind to remain steady with our immediate experience.

Unconsciously restricting the breath indicates that we are out of kilter with life itself.

[Read more…]