photograph by Elizabeth Domike

Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

March 15, 2023

Out breath

and in breath—

know that they are

proof that the world

is inexhaustible.

—Ryōkan  (1758-1851)

*

Yoga

Yoga is Love

There are many ways to learn how to tolerate being uncomfortable.

Yoga has been one of those ways for me.  I’d taken a few classes here and there and watched Lilias! as a teenager. I read then, too, voraciously about the austerities that the yogis performed along with some Buddhist texts. But it wasn’t until 1999 that I found myself going to a yoga class at my gym with a girlfriend of a work colleague who didn’t want to go alone.

It was that one class and the most unusual teacher, an older fellow, shaggy beard, who had been teaching martial arts until he was involved in a car accident from which he learned to rehabilitate himself from, by practicing yoga. Not your normal teacher in a gym, for him it was a short-term gig but after that first class I took every class he taught until one day he was gone.

His replacement was a Russian woman in her 30’s who came over on a visa to compete in fitness competitions and found a way to stay. Born is Siberia, trained as a grade schoolteacher she was able to have tea with our original teacher and find out the bones of what he had been teaching us.

Some classes we would spend an hour on our feet, another day, our necks.

My partner at the time told me after maybe the second class that he liked that I was going, which was unusual as he was a bit particular about time with me. He said I will take you any time you want to go, you are so much “nicer” afterwards.

Olga, my new teacher, did (and does) not have the common American affliction of low self-esteem.

After teaching at the gym for six months she told us she had engaged studio space nearby and was going to teach independently and had found a new teacher for herself and was transitioning from a more fitness-based style to a spine and breath centered style that was developed in India and transmitted to her teacher there.

Over the next four years she trained with him while we followed her around from studio space to studio space until she was fully certified as a yoga therapist and opened her own dedicated studio.

I was happy taking class from her and at my local studio for the next 13 years.  

That is what I did, I worked, I wrote and read poetry and practiced yoga. Always curious, but (for a number of reasons) not interested in traveling either to India or to high priced retreats or trainings. I read, asked questions, and attended a few local workshops with visiting “master” teachers. Including Olga’s own, Gary Kraftsow. He trained in India with the family that trained BKS Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois.

Olga finally started grandfathering me into her classes and workshops for teachers because I wanted to know stuff.

It was kind of a joke, just me, the perpetual student, and all the teachers. Eventually though it became clear that the only way I was going to retain the Sanskrit and more esoteric teachings was to take on the challenge to teach them myself. I took that training and began, much to my surprise, to teach right away, at work, of all places.

After all those years of showing up and taking class and feeling better in my body and avoiding injury and helping my nervous system stay on an even keel, I realized that I loved sharing the teachings with others.

The movement, the meditation, the breathing, the profound deep relaxation. This isn’t a metaphor, teaching for me is love. I love the folks who show up for class and I love being there as a guide for them into their own journey of discovery. Of course, I have my own practice, separate from teaching as well.

How many of us have the opportunity to fall in love every weekday over and over, in love with the shared experience, in love with the creativity (I now read a poem at the end of my morning classes), in love with the community the classes provide, in love with the intoxicating flow during class that is like taking a vacation from the doubts and tribulations of our lives as they are these days?

Each practice is new, even if the movements are similar. Each day is new, the body is a mystery manufacturing plant, astonishing in its ability to throw us for a loop and catch us as we spiral around back towards balance and integration once again.

In the intervening years discomfort has been there, always a companion, but so has the yoga.

I can vaguely make them out, holding hands, heading along the path ahead that leads towards the mystery just over the next rise; the one to which we all one day will return.

–Elizabeth Domike

*

Walk so that your footprints bear only the marks of peaceful joy and complete freedom. To do this, you have to learn to let go – let go of your sorrows, let go of your worries. That is the secret of walking meditation.

Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.

                                                                                   —Thich Nhat Hanh

When I was 11 years old, in the course of a devastating accident, I had an out-of-body experience. 30 years later, parasailing in Hawaii, I recognized the perspective. From a great height I could view my entire neighborhood. I could see residents coming out of their houses and running in the direction of some intense  activity happening far below me. After a time, I heard distant screaming. Then, it was me screaming.

I might have been unconsciously trying to assimilate this experience a couple of years later when my mother came home from her book club with Forever Young, Forever Healthy, by Indra Devi; a kind of autobiography with instructions in the practice of yoga asanas. Devi had been the wife of a Czech diplomat in India. She had become an Indian movie star (hence the name) and had convinced the famous yogi Krishnamacharya to take her as a student—perhaps making her the first woman ever accepted into a yoga ashram. Years later, she opened a studio in Hollywood and taught yoga to movie stars and other famous people. Her book was a success and she followed it up with Yoga For Americans, a six week yoga course in book form. I was intrigued and began a practice of the asanas, which has continued more-or-less unbroken for 60 odd years.

Devi made some reference to the meditative aspect of yoga, but it was an encounter with another book, Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramahansa Yogananda, that convinced me to adopt yoga—an idiosyncratic yoga to be sure—as my way of life. Devi’s yoga was basically exercise. She taught a progressive series of asanas adapted for Western people. Yogananda, on the other hand, created a syncretic religion focused on meditation and the attainment of “cosmic consciousness” or “oneness with God.” He named it Self-Realization Fellowship.

In the hyperbolic language of yogic literature, dedicated practice gives the yogi power over life and death. The authoritative Yoga Sutras lists eight primary siddhis, or magical powers, and many minor ones. Yogananda tells intoxicating stories of healings, appearing in two places at once, walking through walls, stalling passenger trains, and having casual conversations with God, whether in the form of Krishna, Jesus, Buddha, or an articulate glowing light. This was heady stuff for a 13 year old nerdy American boy with no athletic prowess and a considerable capacity for self-depreciation, and I became a committed “devotee.”

As the months and years went by, I noticed that I wasn’t feeling particularly integrated or powerful. While some “meditative experiences” did occur, I actually seemed to be moving in the opposite direction. I was not becoming more integrated, but less. At first I attributed this dissolution to weakness in my practice, but as time went on the Buddhist analysis of the self and of the intention of meditation seemed to confirm my experience. (This is, of course, an extremely condensed picture of my development.) At the university I encountered the Prajnaparamita literature and the Mahayana teachings of emptiness, no-self, and dependent origination or interbeing.

In 1968 I was drafted. The United States involvement in Vietnam was surging, and the anti-war movement was in full oppositional flower. Now, the first axiom of Yoga, philosophically and in practice, is ahimsa or harmlessness—“not to injure any creature by thought, word or deed”—and I applied for Conscientious Objector status, ascribing my dissent to this principle. As part of my application, I had to gather reference letters from as many people as possible. To my genuine surprise, the Self Realization Fellowship refused to support my appeal. The flamboyant Yogananda, with his long hair and ocher robe, had perhaps wisely required his followers to assume a conservative demeanor. The small organization did not want to become the object of government scrutiny. (Conversely, they may have actually believed in so-called conservative values.) 

An FBI agent was assigned to my case. He spoke with friends and neighbors, teachers, acquaintances, and, in the end, he concluded I was sincere. The local draft board turned me down. I appealed to the State Board. An investigation followed; again the investigator concluded I was sincere and the board refused me. This sequence was repeated with the National Board and a Presidential appeal. I was able to read through these various reports due to the Freedom of Information Act. I steeled myself to go to prison. One evening, a friend  advised me to write to my senator, Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a hawkish Democrat who was a strong supporter of US involvement in Vietnam. I felt it was futile, but I wrote to him stating that I thought an injustice was about to occur. To everyone’s surprise, Jackson asked that my  case be reviewed. Two days later I received my Conscientious Objector status. Thus yogic ahimsa was made a precedent in claiming CO standing.

There are many stories about how yoga came into the world. One of my favorites is that Shiva, the Lord of Yoga, created all the forms of life by assuming the appropriate asana for each being. The practice of yoga asanas is an act of identifying with the god, and through him identifying with all creation. In a typical asana session one becomes a dog, a cat, a frog, a cobra, an eagle, a mythic hero, a baby Krishna, a tree—even an abstract being such as a triangle. There is no limit to the possibilities of identification.

To me, the practice of Hatha Yoga is a form of meditation, no different from sitting still or from the  practice of walking described in the quotation above. It should never be done as mere exercise or as a bitter medicine that is supposed to be good for one. I think it’s hilarious when someone refers to me as “disciplined.” For me, yoga is play, something so enjoyable I begin to smile the moment my foot kisses the mat. I never hurt myself “doing my yoga”. I don’t stretch or pull my muscles beyond my capacity. Whether in sitting meditation or in asana practice, I like the sports phrase “playing the edge”—testing one’s limits without trying to go beyond them. Hanging out, exploring the edge of possibility, that edge expands without effort. Ahimsa, the first principle of Yoga, applies to oneself as well as others. 

Although I studied yoga somewhat extensively, I was not one of those western pioneers of the ‘60s who journeyed to the east and practiced at the feet of the gurus. I remained in America, was a dilentantic student at best, and devoted more time to the study and practice of theater than to Indian metaphysics. Any interpretations I have of Yoga or of Buddhist theory and practice are likely, in the language of Harold Bloom, to constitute a misreading. Nevertheless I am bold enough to claim to be a yogi with a small “y”.  The study and practice of Yoga as I understood it has been an unqualified blessing in my life. Whether “kissing the Earth with my feet” or turning the World topsy turvy by standing on my head, I find stability in insecurity and certainty in not-knowing. To anyone who thinks of yoga as a remote or inaccessible regimen, I invite you in this moment to bring your attention to how you are sitting (or standing) and breathing. In a moment of attention without any effort to improve, you can experience yoga, which is the ending of division and conflict. 

—Howard Thoresen

*

I initially began a serious yoga practice shortly after the birth of my first daughter. It began as an escape. I had gone from an independent, young woman pursuing my education and supporting myself, to partnered with a child in a short time. I was looking for something that could be mine. Looking back, I see I needed to grieve for my life before children—for my former identity—and I was searching for a way to complete my metamorphosis. I was looking to relieve the spiritual suffering I couldn’t articulate at the time. 

I met a woman teaching Kundalini yoga. I was drawn in from the first class and started going as often as I could. I liked using mantras and the resonance of speaking these new and foreign powerful words aloud and in community. It felt like tangible strength. I was reconnecting. I was breathing and transforming. And with a flexibility of body comes a flexibility of mind. 

Throughout the years my practice ebbed and flowed. I went from Kundalini to Ashtanga to shadow yoga and back to Ashtanga. There were times I was practicing daily separated by periods with little to no time on the mat. But yoga has been a part of my life since that first class. There is asana and there is everything else. It is the inner practices of yoga (concentration, meditation) that have been the most profound for me. What is striking about yoga to me is its ability to gently guide. I make better, more conscious decisions, as a yogini. 

In 2018, I traveled to Kathmandu to become a certified yoga and meditation teacher. I had no intention of teaching. I simply desired to dive deep and solidify what I began so many years ago – to take a new shape as a person content with the unknown. I am happy, as I now understand that gratitude and presence is love in action and are accessible any time. 

Yoga has now led me to the healing potential of Ayurveda and I am now an Ayurvedic Wellness Counselor, committing myself to a life of balance and wonder. I continue to practice meditation daily and asana on a regular basis and imagine I will do so for the rest of the days within my one wild and precious life. 

In gratitude and light

—Nicole Rush