Hello and welcome to the October 2010 Newsletter.
We have finished three months of intensive Teacher Training here in Cairns and I am very pleased of the effort and accomplishments of the Teacher Trainees. We included the Knoff Yoga Master syllabus this year for the first time and are very happy to announce that Santina Giardina-Chard, has received our highest level of certification:
MASTER LEVEL CERTIFICATION
Santina Giardina-Chard – Broadbeach, Australia
Running simultaneously with the Master Level was the Advanced Course and through their dedicated effort and daily focus, we are happy to announce the following have received their Advanced Level Teaching Certificate:
ADVANCED LEVEL CERTIFICATION
Vikki Parker – Beneraby, Australia
Terese Boes – Kirrawee, Australia
Janka Aksamitova – Cairns, Australia
Judith Kabay – Colombo, Sri Lanka
Louise Zhou – Ganshan Township, Taiwan
“You can never conquer the mountain. You can only conquer yourself.” James Whittaker
Has anyone noticed the year is rushing past? There is still plenty to do and we are taking a group of yogi's to Bali for a wonderful yoga retreat at the end of October. There are still two places available if you can join us – see flyer below. Please contact Janka Aksamitova email: janka@knoffyoga.com.
After returning from Bali I travel to New Zealand to run the Discovery/Foundation Level Teacher Training Course in Wellington, from 15 November to 10 December. I love New Zealand and the great students we have there. I am looking forward to spending time again in the capital city. If you are a certificated Knoff Yoga Teacher in NZ and would like to join the Course part-time for a practice booster, please contact James Bryan email: james@knoffyoga.com.
In the issue of the Newsletter we have the 'Yoga Pose of the Month' article, '108 Sun Salutation' flyer, another insightful article from Tomoko Gregory about her healing broken toe and then an extensive article on 'Goodbye Guilt', followed by an article from Gail Rogers 'Yoga and Voice.
I hope you enjoy reading our Newsletter as much as I do. Feel free to write an article for us and send it to interested family and friends!
“Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So... get on your way.” Dr. Seuss
See you on the yoga mat!
Namaste,
Nicky Knoff.
===========================
Advanced Teacher Training 2010
On Friday, 24 September we celebrated the completion of the 165 hour Advanced & Master Level Teacher Training Course in Cairns.
6 Teacher Trainees were successful in gaining their Teaching Certification.
Congratulations to:
Jian Yang Zhou - Advanced
Janka Aksamitova - Advanced
Judith Kabay - Advanced
Santina Giardina-Chard - Master
Terese Boes - Advanced
Vikki Parker - Advanced
We wish these new ambassadors for yoga every happiness and success in their professional teaching careers and encourage them to illuminate the path for others!
Nicky & James
Ready When You Are
By Kate Holcombe
One of the fundamental principles of yoga is that you start where you are. In the first Yoga Sutra, I.1, "Atha yoga anusasanam," Patanjali begins with the word atha.
Often translated as "now," atha can also mean a blessing, turning point, or commitment. It implies that regardless of what we were doing before, now that we've made a decision to practice yoga, yoga can meet us and serve us right where we are, whatever our age, interest, or ability. In addition to meeting us wherever we are, yoga is designed to keep serving us throughout our journey, as long as we choose to take it. The last word in the sutra is anusasanam. Anu can be translated as "continuous," and sasanam indicates a practical experience.
Though yoga is designed for the mind, the practice is not merely a mental exercise. We are meant to apply the principles and incorporate the practices into our everyday lives for as long as we choose to practice. We can begin our practice at any time, at any age, and yoga will continue to serve us until our very last breath, if we so wish. It is truly a universal practice.
Often translated as "now," atha can also mean a blessing, turning point, or commitment. It implies that regardless of what we were doing before, now that we've made a decision to practice yoga, yoga can meet us and serve us right where we are, whatever our age, interest, or ability. In addition to meeting us wherever we are, yoga is designed to keep serving us throughout our journey, as long as we choose to take it. The last word in the sutra is anusasanam. Anu can be translated as "continuous," and sasanam indicates a practical experience.
Though yoga is designed for the mind, the practice is not merely a mental exercise. We are meant to apply the principles and incorporate the practices into our everyday lives for as long as we choose to practice. We can begin our practice at any time, at any age, and yoga will continue to serve us until our very last breath, if we so wish. It is truly a universal practice.
===========================
Quote
"Happy are those who dream dreams and are ready to pay the price to make them come true."
Leon Joseph Cardinall Suenens
===========================
Yoga Pose of the Month - "VIRABHADRASANA 2"
WARRIOR 2
===========================
Quote
"Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.”
Oscar Wilde
===========================
THE THIRD MESSAGE FROM MY BROKEN TOE!
by Tomoko Gregory
"Happy are those who dream dreams and are ready to pay the price to make them come true."
Leon Joseph Cardinall Suenens
===========================
Yoga Pose of the Month - "VIRABHADRASANA 2"
WARRIOR 2
Like its sibling, Warrior 1, Warrior 2 is a strong pose as you imagine any warrior would want to be. These warriors are 'Warriors of Peace' and their job is to help us in the fight for higher levels of consciousness. Fight might seem like an un-yogic word, but when you consider how much distraction and distortion there is in the world, it is a big challenge to remain peaceful and calm.
Warrior 2 is symbolically throwing a spear with a pointy tip and this sharpness relates to a focused mind. With a focused mind we are better able to discriminate the essential from the non-essential and choose our actions more wisely.
One of the greatest benefits from a long-term yoga practice is that of mental clarity. A lot of the mental static, which is really just mismanaged stress, is minimised and we can hear ourselves think - over the radio jingles, unfinished conversations, distracted thoughts and whatever else that clutter our minds.
Warrior 2 helps us to become strong and vital. It is important to learn how to do it correctly in order to gain the most benefit. Before we jump out to the side and start the practice, let's have a quick discussion about the knee joint. The knee is a hinge joint, just like a door hinge and twisting any hinge is not going to be especially good for it.
When you are standing in Mountain Pose, your knees are horizontal or level. We maintain this alignment with the front leg, when bending it to go into the Warrior 2. If your knee drops in (medially) or out (laterally) from the mid-line of your body, you are putting your knee at risk. There is absolutely no need to do this and in fact it makes it harder to do the pose – so let's pay attention to that front knee and keep it horizontal at all times – including going into and coming out of the pose!
Last month with Warrior 1 we jumped out to the left, so this month let's jump to the right! Work on your jumping technique to make it light and smooth, creating no jarring in our knees or spine. Jump your feet 'wrist width' apart – that is, the little toe side of your feet are directly under the wrist joints of your spread out arms.
Lift up your left heel and release it back 15 degrees and then place it down with the centre of your foot exactly over the centre of the yoga mat. At the Knoff Yoga School in Cairns, all of our yoga mats have a line running down the middle to make this much clearer. Because we clean the mats after each class, I have to re-do the lines about every 3 months. A home practice mat line should last for years, so make the effort and put a line down the middle of your mat if you haven't already done that!
Lift up your right heel and bring it onto the mat line and then lift up your toes and place them on the mat line as well. Now your right foot is at a 90 degree angle. Firmly pull up the thighs on both the front and back legs – kneecaps hugged onto the joints. Look down at your right kneecap and aim the centre of it over the middle line of the mat. When going into and coming out of this pose by flexing and extending the front knee, make sure you keep it level or horizontal. Applying Pada Bandha (toes spread, arches lifted) helps to stabilise your control over the knee.
Inhale and reach out through your fingertips as you pull your shoulder blades downwards and inwards to keep your proud warrior chest open. Align the middle finger of each hand with each other. The fingers and thumbs are squeezed lightly together, much like a karate chop.
As in Mountain Pose, keep the hips neutral, that is don't allow your backside to poke out – not a good look for a warrior! Emphasise lifting the iliac crests (front bones of the hips), keeping the lumbar spine long and the sacrum plate vertical. This action in the spine and hips energises the spine and helps with the mental clarity we discussed.
Exhale and bend the right knee over the heel. DO NOT allow the knee to go beyond the heel towards the toes. This will stress the knee joint and lead to knee pain and problems. The warrior is meant to protect you, not injure you.
Once your shin bone is straight up and down, the second thing to do is to bring the thigh bone horizontal to the floor. When applying this alignment, the front leg is bent at exactly a 90 degree angle. For most new students, it means taking the feet wider apart. Ideally, you should have created this space before bending the knee, but do it now if you need to!
So we are in the pose and lets check our alignment... both feet centred over the middle line on the yoga mat. Feet are activated with Pada Bandha. The back foot is at a 15 degree angle and the front foot is at a 90 degree angle. Front knee is bent over the front heel and the knee is level – neither in or out. The front leg is now at a 90 degree angle. Look left and right to check your wrists are at the same height as your shoulders and both middle fingers are also over the middle line of the yoga mat. Both hands are in the karate chop grip. Finally direct your gaze along the middle finger of the front hand and hold the pose for 5 to 10 breaths – 30 seconds to 1 minute per side.
Keep in mind that the anatomical template on which all of the postures are based is Mountain Pose. In Warrior 2 keep the upper body in the Mountain Pose shape, that is, spine is upright, shoulders broad and shoulder blades drawn down, opening the chest.
Have you heard of 'tuckshop arms'? These are flabby arms, particularly the triceps. Remember how grandma would wave goodbye and her hand would stop, but the underarm would continue to flap in the breeze. Yoga is a great antidote for this flabby condition, but it does require the application of a technique called 'Co-Contraction'. This means we consciously contract opposing muscle groups and in the arms it specifically means contracting the biceps and triceps at the same time – hug the bones!
To make sure you are doing this correctly, simply touch one activated arm with the other hand and feel for firmness in the muscles. Grip the bones and sustain this arm action for the entire duration of the pose – including going into and coming out of, the pose.
Warrior 2 is one of the quintessential yoga postures – it looks like a yoga pose and it is often used in magazine photos to signify 'yoga'. Almost always it is badly performed and straight away tells me that the person approving the photo for publication knows nothing about yoga, so it completely under mines the whole point of the ad.
Now that you know how to do Warrior 2 correctly, add it to your daily practice. In the Knoff Yoga system, it is in the Foundation Level syllabus.
Next month we will look at Wide Leg Pose 1 and continue our exploration of the techniques which underlie and support the intelligent practice of yoga.
See you on the mat!
Namaste
James E. Bryan E.R.Y.T. 500
Warrior 2 is symbolically throwing a spear with a pointy tip and this sharpness relates to a focused mind. With a focused mind we are better able to discriminate the essential from the non-essential and choose our actions more wisely.
One of the greatest benefits from a long-term yoga practice is that of mental clarity. A lot of the mental static, which is really just mismanaged stress, is minimised and we can hear ourselves think - over the radio jingles, unfinished conversations, distracted thoughts and whatever else that clutter our minds.
Warrior 2 helps us to become strong and vital. It is important to learn how to do it correctly in order to gain the most benefit. Before we jump out to the side and start the practice, let's have a quick discussion about the knee joint. The knee is a hinge joint, just like a door hinge and twisting any hinge is not going to be especially good for it.
When you are standing in Mountain Pose, your knees are horizontal or level. We maintain this alignment with the front leg, when bending it to go into the Warrior 2. If your knee drops in (medially) or out (laterally) from the mid-line of your body, you are putting your knee at risk. There is absolutely no need to do this and in fact it makes it harder to do the pose – so let's pay attention to that front knee and keep it horizontal at all times – including going into and coming out of the pose!
Last month with Warrior 1 we jumped out to the left, so this month let's jump to the right! Work on your jumping technique to make it light and smooth, creating no jarring in our knees or spine. Jump your feet 'wrist width' apart – that is, the little toe side of your feet are directly under the wrist joints of your spread out arms.
Lift up your left heel and release it back 15 degrees and then place it down with the centre of your foot exactly over the centre of the yoga mat. At the Knoff Yoga School in Cairns, all of our yoga mats have a line running down the middle to make this much clearer. Because we clean the mats after each class, I have to re-do the lines about every 3 months. A home practice mat line should last for years, so make the effort and put a line down the middle of your mat if you haven't already done that!
Lift up your right heel and bring it onto the mat line and then lift up your toes and place them on the mat line as well. Now your right foot is at a 90 degree angle. Firmly pull up the thighs on both the front and back legs – kneecaps hugged onto the joints. Look down at your right kneecap and aim the centre of it over the middle line of the mat. When going into and coming out of this pose by flexing and extending the front knee, make sure you keep it level or horizontal. Applying Pada Bandha (toes spread, arches lifted) helps to stabilise your control over the knee.
Inhale and reach out through your fingertips as you pull your shoulder blades downwards and inwards to keep your proud warrior chest open. Align the middle finger of each hand with each other. The fingers and thumbs are squeezed lightly together, much like a karate chop.
As in Mountain Pose, keep the hips neutral, that is don't allow your backside to poke out – not a good look for a warrior! Emphasise lifting the iliac crests (front bones of the hips), keeping the lumbar spine long and the sacrum plate vertical. This action in the spine and hips energises the spine and helps with the mental clarity we discussed.
Exhale and bend the right knee over the heel. DO NOT allow the knee to go beyond the heel towards the toes. This will stress the knee joint and lead to knee pain and problems. The warrior is meant to protect you, not injure you.
Once your shin bone is straight up and down, the second thing to do is to bring the thigh bone horizontal to the floor. When applying this alignment, the front leg is bent at exactly a 90 degree angle. For most new students, it means taking the feet wider apart. Ideally, you should have created this space before bending the knee, but do it now if you need to!
So we are in the pose and lets check our alignment... both feet centred over the middle line on the yoga mat. Feet are activated with Pada Bandha. The back foot is at a 15 degree angle and the front foot is at a 90 degree angle. Front knee is bent over the front heel and the knee is level – neither in or out. The front leg is now at a 90 degree angle. Look left and right to check your wrists are at the same height as your shoulders and both middle fingers are also over the middle line of the yoga mat. Both hands are in the karate chop grip. Finally direct your gaze along the middle finger of the front hand and hold the pose for 5 to 10 breaths – 30 seconds to 1 minute per side.
Keep in mind that the anatomical template on which all of the postures are based is Mountain Pose. In Warrior 2 keep the upper body in the Mountain Pose shape, that is, spine is upright, shoulders broad and shoulder blades drawn down, opening the chest.
Have you heard of 'tuckshop arms'? These are flabby arms, particularly the triceps. Remember how grandma would wave goodbye and her hand would stop, but the underarm would continue to flap in the breeze. Yoga is a great antidote for this flabby condition, but it does require the application of a technique called 'Co-Contraction'. This means we consciously contract opposing muscle groups and in the arms it specifically means contracting the biceps and triceps at the same time – hug the bones!
To make sure you are doing this correctly, simply touch one activated arm with the other hand and feel for firmness in the muscles. Grip the bones and sustain this arm action for the entire duration of the pose – including going into and coming out of, the pose.
Warrior 2 is one of the quintessential yoga postures – it looks like a yoga pose and it is often used in magazine photos to signify 'yoga'. Almost always it is badly performed and straight away tells me that the person approving the photo for publication knows nothing about yoga, so it completely under mines the whole point of the ad.
Now that you know how to do Warrior 2 correctly, add it to your daily practice. In the Knoff Yoga system, it is in the Foundation Level syllabus.
Next month we will look at Wide Leg Pose 1 and continue our exploration of the techniques which underlie and support the intelligent practice of yoga.
See you on the mat!
Namaste
James E. Bryan E.R.Y.T. 500
===========================
Quote
"Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.”
Oscar Wilde
===========================
THE THIRD MESSAGE FROM MY BROKEN TOE!
by Tomoko Gregory
I mentioned, in the last newsletter, that I received two messages from my broken toe. The first was that I should be living in the present and that I should spread my consciousness throughout my whole body. The second was how important it is to have proper posture. After I wrote the article, I was left still wondering how it was that my toe became so fragile.
After finishing the Nicky Knoff advanced teacher training course last year I have been practising the advanced syllabus 3 times a week for almost one year. Some postures are quite challenging and tricky, such as the handstand series, backbend series and head stand to chaturanga dandasana. Although these postures and sequences can be quite acrobatic, I have never broken any part of my body before. I was confident that my body was reasonably strong. When I broke my toe I hadn’t done any acrobatics or anything strange, I just walked down the stairs and twisted my foot at the bottom. I was so surprised how fragile my toe was.
When I do yoga practice I spread my consciousness throughout my whole body. This is one of the Knoff Yoga ‘Principles of Practice’: “Mindfulness”. That’s why my body becomes stronger and isn’t fragile. When I broke my toe I wasn’t spreading my consciousness, so I wasn’t aware what I was doing at all. This is why it became fragile. While I was thinking about strength and fragility, I suddenly realised it was another message…”Mindfulness makes us strong. Not being mindful makes us fragile.” This is true for everything - not only our bodies. How I treat my body reflects how I treat the world and my universe. For example, what I did to my toe is often what I do to my children.
After my children come back from school the busiest time of day begins. I cook dinner and both my children start telling me about different things that happened to them during the day…at the same time. I am chopping vegetables in the kitchen and pretending to listen to them, but really I just keep saying yes to them and my mind is not actually paying much attention to them. This is exactly the same kind of situation as when I broke my toe. I am not paying attention to them in a mindful way. If I do that to my children, they will feel that they’re not getting my undivided attention and, therefore, feel that they aren’t being cared about and become sad. If this continues, they might even feel that they are not loved. Lack of love makes them very fragile and, in the end, they will be broken – just like my toe. If I concentrate on listening to them with mindfulness, without doing other things, they are satisfied and feel that they are loved. That feeling makes them stronger. If I do everything for my children with mindfulness they feel they are loved and become stronger.
I misunderstood what love is until just now. I thought loving something or someone is doing something for them. But if I want to love something, or someone, the only thing that I need to do is do everything with mindfulness. For example, when we grow plants if we do everything from digging the hole, planting the seeds, covering them with dirt and watering them with mindfulness, they will be very strong plants. We can love anything in this universe by just doing everything with mindfulness. This is the third message from my broken toe.
After finishing the Nicky Knoff advanced teacher training course last year I have been practising the advanced syllabus 3 times a week for almost one year. Some postures are quite challenging and tricky, such as the handstand series, backbend series and head stand to chaturanga dandasana. Although these postures and sequences can be quite acrobatic, I have never broken any part of my body before. I was confident that my body was reasonably strong. When I broke my toe I hadn’t done any acrobatics or anything strange, I just walked down the stairs and twisted my foot at the bottom. I was so surprised how fragile my toe was.
When I do yoga practice I spread my consciousness throughout my whole body. This is one of the Knoff Yoga ‘Principles of Practice’: “Mindfulness”. That’s why my body becomes stronger and isn’t fragile. When I broke my toe I wasn’t spreading my consciousness, so I wasn’t aware what I was doing at all. This is why it became fragile. While I was thinking about strength and fragility, I suddenly realised it was another message…”Mindfulness makes us strong. Not being mindful makes us fragile.” This is true for everything - not only our bodies. How I treat my body reflects how I treat the world and my universe. For example, what I did to my toe is often what I do to my children.
After my children come back from school the busiest time of day begins. I cook dinner and both my children start telling me about different things that happened to them during the day…at the same time. I am chopping vegetables in the kitchen and pretending to listen to them, but really I just keep saying yes to them and my mind is not actually paying much attention to them. This is exactly the same kind of situation as when I broke my toe. I am not paying attention to them in a mindful way. If I do that to my children, they will feel that they’re not getting my undivided attention and, therefore, feel that they aren’t being cared about and become sad. If this continues, they might even feel that they are not loved. Lack of love makes them very fragile and, in the end, they will be broken – just like my toe. If I concentrate on listening to them with mindfulness, without doing other things, they are satisfied and feel that they are loved. That feeling makes them stronger. If I do everything for my children with mindfulness they feel they are loved and become stronger.
I misunderstood what love is until just now. I thought loving something or someone is doing something for them. But if I want to love something, or someone, the only thing that I need to do is do everything with mindfulness. For example, when we grow plants if we do everything from digging the hole, planting the seeds, covering them with dirt and watering them with mindfulness, they will be very strong plants. We can love anything in this universe by just doing everything with mindfulness. This is the third message from my broken toe.
===========================
GOODBYE, GUILT
by Sally Kempton from Yoga Journal
A Heather had been estranged from one of her childhood friends for several years—the result of a quarrel that both of them held on to out of angry pride. When she heard that her friend was ill with cancer, Heather knew that they needed to reconcile before her friend died. But there was, she told me, an unforgiving place inside her that made it hard to call. She put off calling her friend for months, and when she finally did, her friend was in a coma and could no longer talk. Now Heather was consumed with guilt. "How could I have let my friend die without saying goodbye?" she asked. "I just can't let it go. I can't forgive myself."
I suspect that many of us, like Heather, have spent countless hours replaying a searing, guilty memory. Guilt—feeling bad because you've done something that goes against your values—is a primal human emotion. Everybody feels guilty sometimes. But some of us feel guiltier than others, and not always because we've done more bad stuff. That's why it's crucial to investigate where your guilt is coming from and what kind of guilt you're feeling. Guilt is heavy baggage. You don't want to carry guilt around. If you can distinguish where your guilty feelings are coming from, it's easier to see how to get rid of them, whether that means making amends for something, working through the guilt, or simply letting it go.
There are three basic kinds of guilt: (1) natural guilt, or remorse over something you did or failed to do; (2) free-floating, or toxic, guilt—the underlying sense of not being a good person; and (3) existential guilt, the negative feeling that arises out of the injustice you perceive in the world, and out of your own unpaid obligations to life itself.
Suppose you feel guilty about something immediate and specific—putting a dent in the car your friend lent you or lying to your boyfriend about where you were last night. That's what I call natural guilt. You can tell you're suffering from natural guilt because it's local: It relates to your actions in real, present time. Natural guilt can be horribly painful, especially if there's serious damage involved. But even if what you did was really, really bad, local guilt is reparable. You can make amends. You can ask for forgiveness, pay your debt, and resolve to change your behavior. And once you repair things, the guilt should dissolve (if not, see the section "Toxic Guilt").
Natural guilt serves a functional purpose, and it seems to be hard-wired into the nervous system. It's an internal alarm bell that helps you identify unethical behavior and change course. Natural guilt prompts you to call your mother, or leave your phone number when you ram the fender of a parked car. Natural guilt, some social scientists believe, comes from our ability to empathize with others' suffering, and it's one of the reasons we have things like social safety nets and movements for social justice. When you have a healthy relationship with your personal guilt, you don't agonize over guilty feelings. Instead, you use them as signals to change your behavior.
You deal with your guilt about not calling your sick friend by calling her. You handle your remorse over spending too much by holding back. If your guilt comes from recognizing your own part in some collective wrongdoing—racial injustice or some other form of oppression of one group by another—you look for a way to help bring about change. And if your guilt comes from something you can't do much about—like the working mother's guilt about not being the one to pick up her kid from school every day—you practice giving yourself a break.
That said, natural guilt has a shadow side. It often turns into a major instrument of parental and social control. An old joke captures this perfectly. How many Jewish mothers does it take to screw in a light bulb? None: "Don't worry, I'll just sit here in the dark." But it's not just mothers (Jewish or otherwise) who manipulate us through guilt. Spouses and partners do, too. So do religions, spiritual groups, and tribes—even yoga tribes. Have you ever been guilt-tripped by a vegan friend who caught you eating salmon? In fact, natural guilt gone wrong— that is, when it's too harshly punished or used as a weapon of control—can quickly become toxic. When that happens, we find ourselves in the state of continual low-grade suffering that I call toxic guilt, which is a pervasive feeling of being "wrong" or flawed in some basic way.
Quote
"The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong."
Mahatma Ghandi
===========================
YOGA AND VOICE
By Gail Rogers
Vocal Boot Camp Facilitator
Guest Authors
Do you want to contribute an article about Yoga for today's world?
To submit an article for review, attach it to your e-mail and send it to: james@knoffyoga.com
Feel free to pass this newsletter on to your friends
===========================
Knoff Yoga ©
GOODBYE, GUILT
by Sally Kempton from Yoga Journal
A Heather had been estranged from one of her childhood friends for several years—the result of a quarrel that both of them held on to out of angry pride. When she heard that her friend was ill with cancer, Heather knew that they needed to reconcile before her friend died. But there was, she told me, an unforgiving place inside her that made it hard to call. She put off calling her friend for months, and when she finally did, her friend was in a coma and could no longer talk. Now Heather was consumed with guilt. "How could I have let my friend die without saying goodbye?" she asked. "I just can't let it go. I can't forgive myself."
I suspect that many of us, like Heather, have spent countless hours replaying a searing, guilty memory. Guilt—feeling bad because you've done something that goes against your values—is a primal human emotion. Everybody feels guilty sometimes. But some of us feel guiltier than others, and not always because we've done more bad stuff. That's why it's crucial to investigate where your guilt is coming from and what kind of guilt you're feeling. Guilt is heavy baggage. You don't want to carry guilt around. If you can distinguish where your guilty feelings are coming from, it's easier to see how to get rid of them, whether that means making amends for something, working through the guilt, or simply letting it go.
There are three basic kinds of guilt: (1) natural guilt, or remorse over something you did or failed to do; (2) free-floating, or toxic, guilt—the underlying sense of not being a good person; and (3) existential guilt, the negative feeling that arises out of the injustice you perceive in the world, and out of your own unpaid obligations to life itself.
Natural Guilt
Suppose you feel guilty about something immediate and specific—putting a dent in the car your friend lent you or lying to your boyfriend about where you were last night. That's what I call natural guilt. You can tell you're suffering from natural guilt because it's local: It relates to your actions in real, present time. Natural guilt can be horribly painful, especially if there's serious damage involved. But even if what you did was really, really bad, local guilt is reparable. You can make amends. You can ask for forgiveness, pay your debt, and resolve to change your behavior. And once you repair things, the guilt should dissolve (if not, see the section "Toxic Guilt").
Natural guilt serves a functional purpose, and it seems to be hard-wired into the nervous system. It's an internal alarm bell that helps you identify unethical behavior and change course. Natural guilt prompts you to call your mother, or leave your phone number when you ram the fender of a parked car. Natural guilt, some social scientists believe, comes from our ability to empathize with others' suffering, and it's one of the reasons we have things like social safety nets and movements for social justice. When you have a healthy relationship with your personal guilt, you don't agonize over guilty feelings. Instead, you use them as signals to change your behavior.
You deal with your guilt about not calling your sick friend by calling her. You handle your remorse over spending too much by holding back. If your guilt comes from recognizing your own part in some collective wrongdoing—racial injustice or some other form of oppression of one group by another—you look for a way to help bring about change. And if your guilt comes from something you can't do much about—like the working mother's guilt about not being the one to pick up her kid from school every day—you practice giving yourself a break.
That said, natural guilt has a shadow side. It often turns into a major instrument of parental and social control. An old joke captures this perfectly. How many Jewish mothers does it take to screw in a light bulb? None: "Don't worry, I'll just sit here in the dark." But it's not just mothers (Jewish or otherwise) who manipulate us through guilt. Spouses and partners do, too. So do religions, spiritual groups, and tribes—even yoga tribes. Have you ever been guilt-tripped by a vegan friend who caught you eating salmon? In fact, natural guilt gone wrong— that is, when it's too harshly punished or used as a weapon of control—can quickly become toxic. When that happens, we find ourselves in the state of continual low-grade suffering that I call toxic guilt, which is a pervasive feeling of being "wrong" or flawed in some basic way.
Toxic Guilt
Toxic guilt is what happens when natural guilt festers. It manifests as a nagging feeling of pervasive but nonspecific badness, as if your whole life has something wrong with it. This type of free-floating guilt is the hardest kind to deal with, because it arises from lingering patterns, or samskaras, lodged in your subconscious. How can you expiate your sin or forgive yourself for something when you don't know what it is you did—or when you believe that what you did is essentially irreparable?
To some extent, this particular type of guilt seems to be an unintended by-product of Judeo-Christian culture, a residue of the doctrine of original sin. Yogic texts like the Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga Sutra do not recognize nonspecific guilt, though they do say quite a bit about sin, karma, and how to avoid or purify transgressions. But even though toxic guilt is not specifically mentioned in most traditional lists of yogic obstructions, the yogic teachings do offer help. We need to work with toxic guilt not only to alleviate the pain it causes us, but also because accumulated feelings of guilt build up and attach themselves to any current transgression, even very minor ones, causing negative self-talk and bad feelings that are out of proportion to the offense.
People normally experience toxic guilt in two ways. First, it can simply be there, like a flavor in your personality, a miasmic feeling that can spontaneously come into consciousness at certain times, causing you to feel bad or unworthy. Second, it can be triggered from the outside—whether by a mistake you make or somebody's suspicion. If you're carrying a toxic guilt backpack, it doesn't take much to activate it—a slip-up at the office, a fight with your lover, or a call from your mother can do it. In extreme cases, people feel as though they're walking around on eggshells, afraid they're about to do something that will expose their innate badness. So it's important to learn how to recognize feelings of toxic guilt so that they no longer program you from the inside.
Roots of Guilt
Toxic guilt often has roots in early childhood: Mistakes that your parents or teachers treated as a big deal, for example, or religious training, especially the kind that teaches original sin, can fill us with guilty feelings that have no real basis. Some believers in the doctrine of reincarnation—the idea that our present circumstances are determined by patterns set in past lives—see toxic guilt as the karmic residue of past-life actions stored in our subtle system. One ancient text of Tibetan yoga, called The Wheel of Sharp Weapons, lists past transgressions that certain present-day problems have evolved from and gives remedies for mitigating them. Many of the purist catory yogic practices—especially daily chanting and mantra repetition, selfless service (karma yoga), and offerings—are considered medicine for these guilty feelings.
But there's no question that toxic guilt can also come from a cumulative buildup of specific, unrepaired hurt that you've caused in this life. When you've racked up a few painful moments of self-betrayal, or cheated on a lover or two, or even when you neglect to call your parents or get enough regular exercise, you can accumulate a fair amount of free-flowing guilt. Moreover, a yogi on a path of awakening will often develop an exquisitely scrupulous conscience. Once you begin to hold yourself to the ethical standards of the spiritual path, it becomes harder to let yourself get away with insensitive or harmful behavior. At the same time, you may still have some old habits of carelessness and unconsciousness. So, despite your best intentions, you sometimes do things that you know aren't good for yourself or other people—and feel guilty. B But if you are willing to look more deeply, you'll probably find that your sense of toxic guilt has very little to do with anything that you did. That, paradoxically, is what makes it so toxic. When you suffer from this kind of pervasive guilt, any real-time infraction you commit becomes so freighted by the weight of your stored guilty feelings that facing it can feel paralyzing.
Your guilty feeling could also be social or political. This is the guilt you feel when you see pictures of animals in a pen, or read about the suffering in Zimbabwe, or recognize the radical privilege of your life compared with the lives of many others. I call this existential guilt. Existential guilt is quite real, and even reasonable. Why? Because there is essentially no way to live life on earth without having some sort of negative impact on others, whether it's the owls who lost their homes when trees were cut down for your office park; or the plants you trample while walking in nature; or the fact that your child got a space in a great public school, and lots of your friends' children didn't. Often, the resources we use to live, even to live simply, mean that those same resources are not available to others.
Years ago, a beautiful, wealthy woman told one of my teachers that she was suffering from intense guilt and depression. My teacher responded by asking, "What have you done for life? Have you ever put a bagel on a tree and walked away?" My teacher's remark has stayed with me for years, not only because of its arresting, koanlike quality, but also because of the essential wisdom behind it. That woman's guilt complex was in part existential, and existential guilt can be remedied only by making unconditional offerings to life. Like that woman, most of us reading this magazine live in a privileged milieu, using resources denied to 95 percent of the people on the planet. It's easy to understand why a person might feel a burden of existential guilt. The Vedic sages, whose wisdom is at the root of all the yogic traditions, taught that we have certain basic debts—to our ancestors, to the earth, to our teachers, to God, and to everyone who's helped us. When we don't pay those debts, we suffer from existential guilt.
Modern liberal society, with its intense individualism, broken families, and consumerist attitude toward spirituality, invites existential guilt, simply because so many of us haven't been taught to make the basic gestures that honor the web of life. I'm talking not only about conscious environmental practice, but also about heart practices like inviting guests to your table; sharing food with poor people, animals, and, yes, local spirits; giving service to the community and donating part of your income; taking care of elders.
To complicate matters, when our toxic guilt gets mixed up with our existential guilt, we'll often suffer from a feeling that we're responsible for everyone else's pain. My friend Ellen is an example. She grew up with a rageful mother, who used to direct her anger at Ellen's sister. Ellen empathized profoundly with her sister but felt powerless to stop her mother's scapegoating of her sister. Her helplessness and frustration turned into an overwhelming feeling of responsibility for any pain, anywhere—a type of survivor's guilt. Ellen found herself enabling depressed friends, giving money to spiritual charlatans, and breaking her heart over her inability to rescue everyone she to live up to our own values.
For Ellen, the process of learning to discriminate between true compassion and useless self-sacrifice had to start with checking into her guilty feelings when they arose, asking herself whether her pain at not fixing something was related to the present, or a toxic holdover from the past. Once she'd done that, the work she did to help others became freed of its sticky residue. And, unsurprisingly, it also became a great deal more effective. Like Ellen, we are often confused about what kind of guilt we're feeling. Once we can recognize a painful feeling as guilt and identify its type, it becomes easier to work with it. Some guilts do need amends, because the guilty feeling points out a failure to live up to our own values. Other guilts are best let go.
The Radical Solution
And this is where yoga philosophy offers one of its most valuable and life-changing gifts. The yoga tradition has many specific remedies for feelings of guilt (See Medicine for Guilt for specifics). But the greatest guilt-busting attitude the yogic tradition offers us is the radical recognition of our essential goodness. Tantric traditions especially are known for looking at the world through a lens that sees all life as fundamentally divine. Your attitude toward your guilt will undergo a huge change when you begin to follow a spiritual teaching that—instead of assuming human beings are intrinsically flawed—teaches you to look beyond your flaws and helps you to know your deeper perfection.
My teacher, Swami Muktananda, used to tell a story that I think clearly illuminates the difference between these two ways of viewing ourselves. There were once two monasteries, each located close to a big city. In one monastery, the students were told that human beings were sinners and that intense vigilance and penance were the only ways the students could avoid their sinful tendencies. In the other monastery, the students were encouraged to believe in their fundamental goodness, and to trust their hearts. One day, a young man in each of these monasteries decided that he needed a respite from monastic life. Each boy sneaked out his dormitory window, hitched a ride to the nearby city, found a party, and ended up spending the night with a prostitute. The next morning, the boy from the "sinner" monastery was overcome with punishing remorse. He thought, "I've fallen irrevocably from the path. There's no point in my going back." He didn't return to his monastery and soon became part of a street gang.
The second boy also woke up with a hangover. But his response to the situation was very different. "That was not as satisfying as I imagined it would be," he thought. "I don't think I'll do that again anytime soon." Then he went back to his monastery, climbed in the window, and was admonished for sneaking out at night. My teacher would say that when we believe that we are sinners, a very small slip can send us spiraling into a pattern of self-destructive action. But when we know, as the yoga sages tell us, that we are fundamentally divine, that we are all Buddhas, it's much easier to forgive our selves for the bad or unskillful things we do. It's also easier to change our behavior. So the real solution to our problematic guilty feelings is to recognize, over and over again, the light of God's love that illuminates our heart.
To some extent, this particular type of guilt seems to be an unintended by-product of Judeo-Christian culture, a residue of the doctrine of original sin. Yogic texts like the Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga Sutra do not recognize nonspecific guilt, though they do say quite a bit about sin, karma, and how to avoid or purify transgressions. But even though toxic guilt is not specifically mentioned in most traditional lists of yogic obstructions, the yogic teachings do offer help. We need to work with toxic guilt not only to alleviate the pain it causes us, but also because accumulated feelings of guilt build up and attach themselves to any current transgression, even very minor ones, causing negative self-talk and bad feelings that are out of proportion to the offense.
People normally experience toxic guilt in two ways. First, it can simply be there, like a flavor in your personality, a miasmic feeling that can spontaneously come into consciousness at certain times, causing you to feel bad or unworthy. Second, it can be triggered from the outside—whether by a mistake you make or somebody's suspicion. If you're carrying a toxic guilt backpack, it doesn't take much to activate it—a slip-up at the office, a fight with your lover, or a call from your mother can do it. In extreme cases, people feel as though they're walking around on eggshells, afraid they're about to do something that will expose their innate badness. So it's important to learn how to recognize feelings of toxic guilt so that they no longer program you from the inside.
Roots of Guilt
Toxic guilt often has roots in early childhood: Mistakes that your parents or teachers treated as a big deal, for example, or religious training, especially the kind that teaches original sin, can fill us with guilty feelings that have no real basis. Some believers in the doctrine of reincarnation—the idea that our present circumstances are determined by patterns set in past lives—see toxic guilt as the karmic residue of past-life actions stored in our subtle system. One ancient text of Tibetan yoga, called The Wheel of Sharp Weapons, lists past transgressions that certain present-day problems have evolved from and gives remedies for mitigating them. Many of the purist catory yogic practices—especially daily chanting and mantra repetition, selfless service (karma yoga), and offerings—are considered medicine for these guilty feelings.
But there's no question that toxic guilt can also come from a cumulative buildup of specific, unrepaired hurt that you've caused in this life. When you've racked up a few painful moments of self-betrayal, or cheated on a lover or two, or even when you neglect to call your parents or get enough regular exercise, you can accumulate a fair amount of free-flowing guilt. Moreover, a yogi on a path of awakening will often develop an exquisitely scrupulous conscience. Once you begin to hold yourself to the ethical standards of the spiritual path, it becomes harder to let yourself get away with insensitive or harmful behavior. At the same time, you may still have some old habits of carelessness and unconsciousness. So, despite your best intentions, you sometimes do things that you know aren't good for yourself or other people—and feel guilty. B But if you are willing to look more deeply, you'll probably find that your sense of toxic guilt has very little to do with anything that you did. That, paradoxically, is what makes it so toxic. When you suffer from this kind of pervasive guilt, any real-time infraction you commit becomes so freighted by the weight of your stored guilty feelings that facing it can feel paralyzing.
Existential Guilt
Your guilty feeling could also be social or political. This is the guilt you feel when you see pictures of animals in a pen, or read about the suffering in Zimbabwe, or recognize the radical privilege of your life compared with the lives of many others. I call this existential guilt. Existential guilt is quite real, and even reasonable. Why? Because there is essentially no way to live life on earth without having some sort of negative impact on others, whether it's the owls who lost their homes when trees were cut down for your office park; or the plants you trample while walking in nature; or the fact that your child got a space in a great public school, and lots of your friends' children didn't. Often, the resources we use to live, even to live simply, mean that those same resources are not available to others.
Years ago, a beautiful, wealthy woman told one of my teachers that she was suffering from intense guilt and depression. My teacher responded by asking, "What have you done for life? Have you ever put a bagel on a tree and walked away?" My teacher's remark has stayed with me for years, not only because of its arresting, koanlike quality, but also because of the essential wisdom behind it. That woman's guilt complex was in part existential, and existential guilt can be remedied only by making unconditional offerings to life. Like that woman, most of us reading this magazine live in a privileged milieu, using resources denied to 95 percent of the people on the planet. It's easy to understand why a person might feel a burden of existential guilt. The Vedic sages, whose wisdom is at the root of all the yogic traditions, taught that we have certain basic debts—to our ancestors, to the earth, to our teachers, to God, and to everyone who's helped us. When we don't pay those debts, we suffer from existential guilt.
Modern liberal society, with its intense individualism, broken families, and consumerist attitude toward spirituality, invites existential guilt, simply because so many of us haven't been taught to make the basic gestures that honor the web of life. I'm talking not only about conscious environmental practice, but also about heart practices like inviting guests to your table; sharing food with poor people, animals, and, yes, local spirits; giving service to the community and donating part of your income; taking care of elders.
To complicate matters, when our toxic guilt gets mixed up with our existential guilt, we'll often suffer from a feeling that we're responsible for everyone else's pain. My friend Ellen is an example. She grew up with a rageful mother, who used to direct her anger at Ellen's sister. Ellen empathized profoundly with her sister but felt powerless to stop her mother's scapegoating of her sister. Her helplessness and frustration turned into an overwhelming feeling of responsibility for any pain, anywhere—a type of survivor's guilt. Ellen found herself enabling depressed friends, giving money to spiritual charlatans, and breaking her heart over her inability to rescue everyone she to live up to our own values.
For Ellen, the process of learning to discriminate between true compassion and useless self-sacrifice had to start with checking into her guilty feelings when they arose, asking herself whether her pain at not fixing something was related to the present, or a toxic holdover from the past. Once she'd done that, the work she did to help others became freed of its sticky residue. And, unsurprisingly, it also became a great deal more effective. Like Ellen, we are often confused about what kind of guilt we're feeling. Once we can recognize a painful feeling as guilt and identify its type, it becomes easier to work with it. Some guilts do need amends, because the guilty feeling points out a failure to live up to our own values. Other guilts are best let go.
The Radical Solution
And this is where yoga philosophy offers one of its most valuable and life-changing gifts. The yoga tradition has many specific remedies for feelings of guilt (See Medicine for Guilt for specifics). But the greatest guilt-busting attitude the yogic tradition offers us is the radical recognition of our essential goodness. Tantric traditions especially are known for looking at the world through a lens that sees all life as fundamentally divine. Your attitude toward your guilt will undergo a huge change when you begin to follow a spiritual teaching that—instead of assuming human beings are intrinsically flawed—teaches you to look beyond your flaws and helps you to know your deeper perfection.
My teacher, Swami Muktananda, used to tell a story that I think clearly illuminates the difference between these two ways of viewing ourselves. There were once two monasteries, each located close to a big city. In one monastery, the students were told that human beings were sinners and that intense vigilance and penance were the only ways the students could avoid their sinful tendencies. In the other monastery, the students were encouraged to believe in their fundamental goodness, and to trust their hearts. One day, a young man in each of these monasteries decided that he needed a respite from monastic life. Each boy sneaked out his dormitory window, hitched a ride to the nearby city, found a party, and ended up spending the night with a prostitute. The next morning, the boy from the "sinner" monastery was overcome with punishing remorse. He thought, "I've fallen irrevocably from the path. There's no point in my going back." He didn't return to his monastery and soon became part of a street gang.
The second boy also woke up with a hangover. But his response to the situation was very different. "That was not as satisfying as I imagined it would be," he thought. "I don't think I'll do that again anytime soon." Then he went back to his monastery, climbed in the window, and was admonished for sneaking out at night. My teacher would say that when we believe that we are sinners, a very small slip can send us spiraling into a pattern of self-destructive action. But when we know, as the yoga sages tell us, that we are fundamentally divine, that we are all Buddhas, it's much easier to forgive our selves for the bad or unskillful things we do. It's also easier to change our behavior. So the real solution to our problematic guilty feelings is to recognize, over and over again, the light of God's love that illuminates our heart.
===========================
Quote
"The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong."
Mahatma Ghandi
===========================
YOGA AND VOICE
By Gail Rogers
Vocal Boot Camp Facilitator
Your voice isn't the only part of your body used when talking or singing. Your whole body is used thus warming up your body is essential. All tension needs to be released and stretching through yoga before you talk or sing is the perfect way to achieve these goals.
Strain when singing can be caused by more than just skipping physical warm ups. If your posture is a little off, your vocal instrument placement isn't quite right your voice is at risk for strain and damage.
Your breath is very important as it is the power-source of your speech. Become aware of your breathing patterns. When you are nervous or stressed you may use shallow breathing which causes the tension in your body to multiply. Any tension can and will have negative effects upon your voice causing vocal strain and eventually damage. Diaphragmatic breathing is the most effective method of breathing for talking & singing.
Healthy vocal habits are very important. Become aware of what these are!
Imagine yourself as royalty. This is all perfectly natural and normal. It is simply the way you present yourself – with poise and self-confidence. When you have proper posture you can learn to breathe properly. Correct breath support and control is the gateway to clear speech and communication.
We breath for living through:
Involuntary impulses to the brain
The diaphragm contracts and flattens to enlarge the thorax or chest cavity
The costal or rib muscles expand causing the air pressure to drop within the lungs. The air pressure inside the lungs then equals to the air pressure outside the lungs.
Then we exhale
Remember: when people refer to speaking from your diaphragm it is meant to be a locational reference. The activities of the diaphragm are completely involuntary. You don't control it – your brain does.
Effective breathing takes time to develop. You have to keep practising to build strength and endurance.
Gail Rogers
vocalbootcamp@hotmail.com
===========================Strain when singing can be caused by more than just skipping physical warm ups. If your posture is a little off, your vocal instrument placement isn't quite right your voice is at risk for strain and damage.
Your breath is very important as it is the power-source of your speech. Become aware of your breathing patterns. When you are nervous or stressed you may use shallow breathing which causes the tension in your body to multiply. Any tension can and will have negative effects upon your voice causing vocal strain and eventually damage. Diaphragmatic breathing is the most effective method of breathing for talking & singing.
Healthy vocal habits are very important. Become aware of what these are!
Imagine yourself as royalty. This is all perfectly natural and normal. It is simply the way you present yourself – with poise and self-confidence. When you have proper posture you can learn to breathe properly. Correct breath support and control is the gateway to clear speech and communication.
We breath for living through:
Involuntary impulses to the brain
The diaphragm contracts and flattens to enlarge the thorax or chest cavity
The costal or rib muscles expand causing the air pressure to drop within the lungs. The air pressure inside the lungs then equals to the air pressure outside the lungs.
Then we exhale
Remember: when people refer to speaking from your diaphragm it is meant to be a locational reference. The activities of the diaphragm are completely involuntary. You don't control it – your brain does.
Effective breathing takes time to develop. You have to keep practising to build strength and endurance.
Gail Rogers
vocalbootcamp@hotmail.com
Guest Authors
Do you want to contribute an article about Yoga for today's world?
To submit an article for review, attach it to your e-mail and send it to: james@knoffyoga.com
Feel free to pass this newsletter on to your friends
===========================
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