Lazy Man Yoga

Archive for September, 2009

After a little stretching and rolling around on the floor this is where you will find me.

Modified yoga corpse pose.

If you are going to play dead, you might as well be comfortable.

Pressing on the back of the shoulder, on a heart related pressure point, might help ease and release the heart for a deeper relaxation.

I’ve started to get Smithsonian magazine and it gives me a needed break from reading Time magazine. The news is so full of conflict and crazy people doing awful things. There is just so much of that I can stand.

This afternoon my wife and I went over to a Bird and Butterfly garden that is part of the CT Experimental Agricultural Station just a couple miles from where we live. We sat on a bench near a small waterfall with a water lilly garden and just practiced peaceful contemplation for a half hour and hardly spoke with each other. We were the only people there. I noticed how my face relaxes during those times, and how I feel like there is a hint of a smile on my face.

I came home afterwards and read an article in Smithsonian magazine about some Japanese gardens that are also suitable for contemplation (the word used in the article). I looked up that word in the dictionary, and I am growing more fond of it all the time.

Most folks don’t seem to have the capacity to be still, quiet, and to enjoy a natural scene for a half hour or so. Perhaps we view such passivity and inactivity as a sin or a waste of valuable time. As if becoming peaceful and easy inside is a waste of time. What has happened to people that they have lost their natural capacity for peace, ease, and rest, a capacity that our cats and dogs practice with such ease and regularity?

Allan

Yoga and meditation have a long history and yet what we have come to know in the West now as yoga is really only the tip of the iceberg and a tip that has probably formed more recently than many realize. The ancient practice of yoga was much more meditative and contemplative, characterized by a stillness and deep awareness that sometimes can seem to be sorely lacking in our current practices. The ancient practitioners (including the Buddha, probably the most famous yogi and certainly the most influential) did not spend much time doing headstands, shoulder stands, spinal twists or contortionistic backbends. Not that they were unaware of their bodies, probably quite the contrary. They just managed to align, relax and adjust themselves with such ease, grace and subtlety that no one noticed or bothered to make much of it. Perhaps the ancients did not suffer the kinds of strains, tensions and distortions that we moderns do and so did not need the blatant exertions, like those seen in modern yoga classes, to correct the milder and fewer physical flaws they experienced.

Yoga, when it is truly inspired and rightly guided, can have a very different feel and look to it from the yoga that is practiced today. What has come down to us as traditional yoga is probably an amalgam of more recent developments and influences including, surprisingly enough, English gymnastics and calisthenics. Even the yoga we call Hatha was probably developed only in the last 500 or 600 years of Indian History. The more ancient practices of yoga and meditation go back 3 or 4 thousand years and probably even predate the Aryan invasions that occurred around 1500 BC. Some Indus Valley clay seals showing men seated in what appear to be meditation postures have been unearthed at sites in pre-Aryan, Indus Valley city-states.

Perhaps there is a happy middle way of practicing yoga today that lies somewhere between the exertions of a contemporary Hatha yoga practice and the more sedentary and contemplative style of the ancients. It may be especially important for those of us known as the baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1960 and now in our 40’s, 50’s and older) to look for a kind of yoga that is easy, gentle and sensible. This yoga would be a more mature practice for a more mature person. It is certainly true that what may be suitable for an 18 year old or someone in their twenties may not be right or even desirable for those of us two or three times that age. Where the 18 or 20 year old may benefit and enjoy the powerful twists, bends and balances of a vigorous practice, the 55 and 60 year olds can just as easily be injured and strained by them. There must be an easier, subtler and even more therapeutic way to practice yoga, and there is.

A yoga practice can be guided by one’s own inner body sense of tension, stiffness, strain and distortion (the kinesthetic sense). Certain key muscle groups can, when tight and short, be prime culprits in creating our stressed and distorted bodies and addressing the issue of tightness and constriction in these muscles can be a large and effective part of a more mature yoga practice. A number of simple yoga tools can greatly enhance this kind of practice. Some of these tools can be found at my commercial web site at: YogaTools.com

YogaTools.com – Relieve Tension, Stiffness, and Physical Distortions with Yoga Tools

A good recliner can be a fine place to have a period of rest and relaxation. Take a mini vacation from the hustle and bustle and find a half hour or forty minutes to just consciously rest and relax. It might not be as easy as you think. Our natural restlessness and desire to be accomplishing things can definitely get in the way. But it all can wait as you lie back and sink into the chair or bed or whatever affords the greatest comfort.

Rest and relaxation have a natural course to take with certain specific experiences as a part. Arms and legs get heavy. Hands, and maybe feet, become warmer. Head cools; mind settles down and becomes quieter. A gentle paralysis renders you immobile or disinclined to move. Sleep may come or may not perhaps depending on how tired we are. This is an altered state in that it is different from what we usually experience when we are conscious and awake.

Our cats and dogs are experts at this. We most likely are not. Our thoughts too often tell us to keep moving, stay active, get things accomplished. That is all well and good but there is this other side to our natural functioning and to indulge it, on occasion, is to find our balance and our capacity for healing.