Lazy Man Yoga

After a nice lunch of vegetarian chili and cider, and after it all digested enough, a visiting friend (who is also a professional philosopher) and I turned to the issue of the day and that was pumping iron. He wants to build up some upper body strength and his doctor recommended using weights. When I was a teenager I used them, and bought them with my Bar Mitzvah money, and turned myself into a regular incredible hulk. Well maybe not but I did my share of pumping iron and still have a vague recollection of how to use them. My philosophical friend is funny and although he disavows the primacy of rules and morals anymore, in his life and philosophy, he did seem to want to know what the exact rules were for lifting weights. Those rules are probably listed somewhere but I don’t know them. The rules I have made up for lifting weights, and for anything else, are not to strain too much and don’t forget to breathe. Going slow can also be nice as is not going at all. Stillness that is.

With my instruction (and my style is loose indeed) I tried to show my friend how to breathe with his diaphragm, our principal breathing muscle. How when we breathe deeply and diaphragmatically the abdomen swells like a balloon. We have all seen those bellies on the laughing Buddha statutes and now we know why he is laughing. This is freedom, and this is breathing, as it was meant to be. But what about that bulging belly. Unbecoming, sloppy, out of shape, like a baby. No, for my friend, this cannot be although I did notice that he seemed to have some difficulty employing his diaphragm when he tried to breathe deeply. I wouldn’t be surprised that living in your head means not breathing with your belly. Like the laughing Buddha, with his bulging belly, the danger is we could all be reduced to happy simpletons.

In one of my dreams last night I was attending some wrestling matches but really wasn’t interested in watching any of the matches.  I was more interested in just getting some rest, which I did, and ignored the competition of the matches.  I get rest in my dreams, take breaks, lie back, relax and feel like I am floating away and that is in a dream.  I do it in my waking life too.  We can split our lives up into two basic parts, wrestling and rest. 

Any yoga teacher, who is also inclined towards writing and thinking, will eventually write about rest and relaxation. If there is a goal to our physical practice, it is being able to rest and relax in a deep and a profound way. Our classes usually end with a period of rest and relaxation, but a period of relaxation that often is too short and not entirely satisfying. Rest and Relaxation have a natural course to take and ten or fifteen minutes might only be just the beginning to that course. A half hour to an hour might be more like it. And in that time a number of distinct and rather interesting experiences can occur, and be recognized, if the practitioner remains conscious and awake. I always like to mention that there are no rules I know about against falling asleep during the rest period. It is allowed and probably necessary for those of us who are really extremely tired or sleep deprived and a whole lot of us are.

Yet if you do remain mostly conscious and awake during a period of conscious relaxation there are some features to the experience that are worth mentioning and taking note of. Perhaps quickly, or maybe after 10 or 15 minutes of remaining still, supine, and comfortably supported and warm, we begin to sink away. We get to feeling heavy, immobile, gently paralysed. The sensation can be greeted with panic or as a welcome relief from all the frantic and frenetic activity we usually are engaged in in our active lives. Welcome the paralysis, surrender to the immobility, let it have its way with you.

You may notice a reversal of circulation in the body. A hot head becomes cooler and hands and feet may warm. The images and echos, that usually fill our dancing and prancing minds, quiet down and become less insistent that we pay them a lot of attention. What a sweet repose we enter into and then there is the growing conviction that we might never move or do anything ever again. Ease, peace, quiet, rest, relaxation, bliss become who and what we are. No more no less.

Inevitably and eventually we emerge from such a state but emerge rested, refreshed, and maybe a little more in tune with who we are naturally and a little more at home in our bodies and in the universe.

Science tries to understand and explain the workings of the world with logic and by employing observation and experimentation before coming to any conclusions. Building on past knowledge and explanations can be helpful but not always totally accurate or reliable. We still need to rely on our own observations and experiments before we draw any conclusions. When I was younger, I did a lot of reading and studying on meditation and yoga. You might call meditation and yoga part of the mystic arts which could also include Zen, Taoism, Sufism and the like. These might be called mystic practices because so many people find such practices mystifying and don’t really understand what they are about. But there is a science of meditation and yoga that has emerged here in Western Civilization, and it is based largely on a modern understanding of anatomy and physiology. It is how I try to understand what these practices are about and what my own practice is about.

Ostensibly meditation is about practicing stillness which is a very foreign concept indeed in Western culture. As I see it Western culture is about movement, improvement, invention, progress, development, work, and enterprise. So what is it with these folks who like to sit in meditation for hours on end and contemplate their navels or whatever it is they are doing? What a waste of valuable time it appears to be when you could be working on something and improving yourself or your society for the better.
Consciously staying still (and maybe relaxing) is to be avoided and so this sort of practice is a mystery. We are geared for action and accomplishment. We are in the driver’s seat and always moving forward towards a bigger, better, and brighter future. What sense does it make to idle in neutral or even to turn the engine off? But that is exactly what the meditator does, idle in neutral or turns the engine off. And what can be amazing about this process is that when the engine is not in engaged, when we idle and consciously stay still, interesting things can happen. Insights may appear.

We may become aware of how tired we really are and how tense we feel. We can sense that we are all tied up with tensions in almost every corner of our bodies and burdened with a fatigue that is deep and profound. We may ache in our belly and heart and head. We may begin to discover what the actual remedy may be for our afflictions and it may not be, and probably isn’t, what we call physical education, exercise, and fitness. If we practiced yoga before, the nature of that practice can totally change when awareness ripens in this way. Our practice is then not an exercise anymore but an ongoing physical therapy guided by our own sense of stiffness, tension, and ache. Our practice becomes inspired and creative, guided by an inner sense of the body. We might be inclined to instruct others in what we have discovered, but always with the realization that others have their our own paths to follow and theirs may be different from our own. But there is still common ground to share, and we need to reach out to others and share what we know and feel.

It is my impression that this kind of process is happening in a big way in America now and in Western Civilization. Much material is appearing and being shared by people on this kind of journey and eventually it may even change the course of our civilization, make it less driven, aggressive, and destructive and introduce a kind of balance we have been lacking. These emerging teachings will show us the value of stillness, rest, ease, peace, and relaxation. They will show us what it is we have been missing and lacking in our lives, and maybe reveal a more essential, natural, and spontaneous way to live.

There is a popular medical, pain management technique, called a ‘stellate ganglia block’, done with an injection of anesthesia into the upper thoracic and lower cervical area near the spine.

This seems to be a regular technique used for arm pain and maybe neck, head, and chest discomforts too. The stellate ganglia are part of the sympathetic nervous system and they come in pairs and lie on either side of the spine in the upper thoracic region. I often feel like something is stuck in there and years ago I used to actually tear the skin over the upper thoracic vertebrae in an attempt to relieve the discomfort I was feeling there. I am a lot more gentle and careful now. I did have someone do a drawing that illustrated my discomfort in this region and this is it. I felt pierced and wounded, as if by an arrow stuck in my upper back. I felt like I was carrying a weight on my shoulders.

Here’s a color drawing of the sympathetic nerve. The inferior cervical ganglia are also called the stellate ganglia maybe because they have so many branches reaching out in many directions affecting a large area of the upper body.

Stellate ganglia (inferior cervical ganglia)________________

Now I use a two-roller technique with a small roller placed in the upper thoracic area, delivering the manipulation, and a large roller supporting my head. The action is a prying open of the space between the first and second thoracic vertebrae. This helps tone down the sympathetic nerves and specifically the stellate (lower cervical) ganglia. These nerves deliver the stress, tension, strain, and distortion message to the body. Open up this upper thoracic area and we go a long ways towards relieving arm, neck, head, and chest discomforts and strains.

The sympathetic nerve ganglia are in pairs and lie on either side of the spine. Leaning to one side or the other, and then pressing into the spine, effectively helps release these stress and tension inducing ganglia, muting their stress and tension producing actions. A small roller might be more effective than a large one, in this upper thoracic region, because it can focus more sharply between these vertebrae.

Feeling tired?  By the time we get into our fifties and sixties we might be feeling very tired indeed. The demands of life have caught up with us and we start to slump with fatigue.  But even though we might feel tired and exhausted we can’t seem to rest.  All those demands keep demanding or so it seems. We are running on empty but we can’t stop running.   We are convinced there is no rest for the weary and never will be.  Our minds keep blaring at us ”do this, do that, go here, go there”.  It often takes a disease or disability to put us off our feet, to cease our daily rounds.  So give yourself a break, indulge, and take a rest. Make it last a day or two or more.  You probably deserve it and certainly need it and if you aren’t sure what it looks like it looks like this:

  

Place the large roller against the lower rib cage in back and lean over to one side and allow the roller to press, roll and massage the lower ribs on that side and then the other.  Feel for where there may be ache and stiffness in the ribcage and massage and roll for relief.  The diaphragm attaches all around the inside of the lower ribs and then to the first 3 or 4 lumbar vertebrae via tendons (the crura).  If it is chronically tense and short (as it is in many of us) it will eventually strain and distort the whole middle region of the back and trunk of the body.  Press, roll, and massage those areas that feel stiff, achy, and tense in the ribs in back.  Sense how the breathing eases and deepens as you relieve the stiffness and the ache.

I like this little chapter from the Tao Te Ching. It is an argument for surrender and hints at what we might be surrendering to.

To remain whole, be twisted!
To become straight, let yourself be bent.
To become full, be hollow.
Be tattered, that you may be renewed.
from the TAO TE CHING Chapter 20,
Translation by Arthur Waley