2014 YLT 5th Weekend Summary

Posted on June 26, 2014 by admin

Theme of Weekend 5: Emotions and Yoga: What are emotions and how can we use yoga to work with them intelligently and compassionately? What is the attachment process that we all experience as infants and throughout our relational lives and hoe does this relate to our emotions? (This is a year long course compressed into a weekend!)

Meditation: “Resting in the Open Heart”: Find the balance of weight and lightness, release the breath, and visualize a sphere of light centered in the heart and radiating into the space around you. Wait, rest here. Now visualize your center channel opening from the heart up through the crown chakra into the heavens, and down through the root chakra into the earth. Allow the energies of heaven and earth to pour in to your heart center and receive this as divine love. Let that love spread throughout your cellular body. With your heart energized, allow your own love to flow up and out into the heavens and down into mother earth. Then rest in place of balance with your open heart, earth and the heavens connected and clear. (This is an evolving process that may take a while…be patient! Remember, light is more powerful and accurate than energy: energy more powerful and accurate than structure; structure more powerful and accurate than thought.)

Mantra Practice: Learn Om Purnamdah…, Om Saha na vavatu…., and Om namaste astu Bhagavan, so we can go further.

Sutras Discussion: There are not many sutras dealing directly with emotions, but many imply them. And sometimes Patanjali refers to thought, but really means the underlying emotional energies that enliven the thoughts. (If you are finding the sutras to be a bit dry, please immerse yourself in the Katha Upanishad. It is a bit ‘juicier’!)

I-33: maitri karuna mudita upeksha… is used by the Buddhists as well as the yogis and gives instructions on how to counter the negative emotions of envy or jealousy, disgust, the desire to inflict harm and intolerance, by cultivating the positive ones of loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity. This process, called pratypaksha bhavana in sutra II-33 is described in contemporary neuroscience as a re-wiring of the circuits that run from the amygdala to the pre-frontal cortex. The hard wired tendency to fear and anxiety, coming from the organism’s innate desire to survive, can be over-ridden with practice and patience. (See Rick Hanson’s note below.) In sutra II-34, Patanjali describes in even more detail the action of negative emotions and actually repeats ‘pratipaksha bhavanam from I-33, cultivating the opposite feelings/thought/emotions.

In II-7 and II-8, as part of the discussion of the impediments to practice, the kleshas, Patanjali introduces attraction and aversion, raga and dvesa. I desperately want/need this. I equally, absolutely have to eliminate this. These are fun to work with. Emotions move us. That is what emotions are, from the Latin e – motere, to be moved. But what truly moves us? Love, compassion, altruism, the desire to improve the world? Sometimes. But also the relentless ‘what about me’ voices that can also shape and direct how we utilize our life force, our prana. Meditation practice cultivates the ability to differentiate and discriminate the inner voices, to help restrain impulsiveness, and to choose more carefully how we act and what we say. Next weekend we will take up the yamas and niyamas, II-30 – II-45, with more unfolding of the emotional challenges of life.

Question: What about attachment. Doesn’t vairagyam promote non-attachment? This brings us to the attachment process, a result of our mammalian brain/limbic system. Young mammals, and especially humans, need to have an intimate relationship with a more mature mammal, to ensure the growth and development of a healthy nervous system. The attachment profile describes the ways in which we enter into and sustain relationships with others (and aspects of ourselves!). (Here is a web site with some basic information on this.)

What we discover is that the fundamental attachment energy is love. In fact one can argue that love is the only emotion and all other emotions are variations on healthy and unhealthy expressions of love. This refers, of course, to unconditional love. No limits, no boundaries, no exclusions, the feminine side of an awakened mind. Of course, there are unhealthy expressions of attachment/bonding and for these we again need discrimination to be able to recognize these and ‘nirodh‘, or transform the energies carried in these behavioral patterns. Non-attachment means not being attached to the habits that keep reeking emotional havoc in your own mind, your loved ones and the world. It does not mean to be emotionally detached and passionless, but to live with a passion based on love.

This is what Patanjali is describing in I-2, yogash citta vrtti nirodha; yoga is the dissolution of the dysfunctional emotional patterns of the mind-field into the vast infinite present. But because of habits, priming and conditioning, collectively known as samskaras in Sanskrit, patterns that seem to have dissolved can reappear at any time. Which is why persistence in stabilizing the healthy emotions, abhyasa, is stressed early on in the sutras.

(Rick Hanson, co-author of Buddha’s Brain has a weekly letter with insights on integrating neuroscience and spiritual practice. His latest is perfectly timed to help in our discussion.

Hello,

It’s wonderful and also kind of crazy: right now, whatever you experience is slowly changing your brain.

Most of the good stuff we all want inside – the gratitude, kindness, grit, self-worth, confidence, feeling loved, resilience, compassion, insight, happiness, and inner peace – comes from turning passing experiences of these good qualities of mind and heart into lasting inner strengths woven into the fabric of the brain.

Unfortunately, there’s a bottleneck built into the brain: its evolved negativity bias that makes it like Velcro for bad experiences but Teflon for good ones – which makes it harder to turn beneficial experiences into inner strengths.

Meanwhile, feelings of stress, frustration, irritation disappointment, hurt, worry, and pain are being rapidly and efficiently coded into neural structure . . . relentlessly tilting the mind toward pessimism, anxiety, reactivity, contraction, drivenness, craving and clinging, weariness, and a blah blue mood.

Happily, you can use the power of mindfulness in everyday life to recognize and tune into wholesome experiences and then sustain present moment awareness of them. Since “neurons that fire together, wire together,” this mindful cultivation of beneficial thoughts, feelings, sensations, desires, and skills in your mind will naturally grow resources in your brain.

This week’s practice – be mind full of good – is a profoundly effective (and enjoyable!) path to psychological healing, well-being and effectiveness, sense of fulfillment, and the upper reaches of human potential.

Warmly,

Rick

Breathing Practice: Differentiating Ribs and Diaphragm through Viloma I and II

The heart or 4th chakra is the center of centers in the body/mind, but the 3rd chakra plays a key role in balancing emotional energies. By learning to feel our way around the mid body and deepen our perceptions of the breathing process, we can liberate a lot of bound up emotional energy. (As a response to danger the organism mobilizes its emotional energies to prepare for movement. It can flee (run using legs/ lower chakras), fight (using arms if human, claws and jaws for most, upper chakras), or freeze. The freeze response goes right to the diaphragm needs to be released.)

Using folded blankets or a small bolster to support the spine and chest, let the body relax and feel your breath. Notice the in breath, the out breath, and the natural pauses between. Soften more and more. When the time is right, begin to allow the expanding ribs to be the main component of the inhalation, and the squeezing of the lower body pushing the diaphragm up into the chest be the primary component of the exhalation. Allow the ribs to stay a little more open as you exhale, allow the diaphragm to wait a bit on the inhale. Learn to differentiate between the ribs and diaphragm.

The following is one of many variations of viloma pranayama.

Viloma I. From the ribs, inhale part way and pause. Holding the chest open release the sides of the diaphragm where they might be confused with the ribs, without releasing the breath. Repeat: using the ribs, inhale further, pause. During the pause, release the perimeter of the diaphragm and feel a subtle squeezing of the inner abdominal wall without releasing the breath. Repeat a third time and then release the breath slowly and evenly. During the pauses keep eyes, ears, throat and brain passive. That completes one cycle. Fee free to take a few normal breaths before beginning the next cycle if necessary. Also, the cycle given here has three steps. Feel free to do two, or many (like sipping the breath) if that feels better. When the last cycle is completed, relax and observe the breath.

Viloma II: Take a short but full inhalation and divide the exhalation into stages. Exhale part way, releasing the diaphragm but not dropping the chest. Pause and recharge the ribs so they stay open. Exhale step two, releasing diaphragm but slowing down the ribs;pause and recharge the ribs. Final stage of exhalation, natural pause, recharge the ribs softly. This completes one cycle. Rest and repeat cycles to one’s capacity. At the end, feel the changes inside that arise from the practice.

Anatomy/Kinesiology: In flipping the dog, the supporting shoulder is vulnerable to injury. How do we train the arms to be strong and flexible simultaneously?

Shoulder problems arise here because the gleno-humeral (aka shoulder) joint tends to be hyper mobile and the shoulder blade/scapula hypo mobile. Thus it is easy to partially ‘dislocate’ the humerus bone when weight bearing in odd positions like this. The clue is to mobilize the shoulder blade and collar bone so they acts as a bridge connecting core-spine-ribs to the arm. If the scapula tracks accurately, there is no strain on the shoulder joint. The achromio-clavicular or ‘ac’ joint and sterno-clavicular joint also help stabilize the shoulder by bringing support from the sternum front/chest through the collar bone.

On the muscular side, the posterior rotator cuff can be over-active, especially in the arms to the side position. Stand with your arms extending forward, like a standing plank position. Feel how the humerus bone is stable in the joint in this position by following the line of energy from the spine and ribs through the shoulder girdle into the arms and out the hands .

Our quadripedal friends live here. To deepen the sensation, remember that the arms are made for hugging. To bring your arms out to the side, just opne the hug wider and wider, but keep the slight curve in the energy field. Notice when and if there is a break in the energy.

Most students eventually, unconsciously, move the arms and leave the shoulder girdle behind, mis-aligning the shoulder joint. Then they try to ‘stretch’ to open the chest. From the perspective of the energy body, this break is obvious, but you have to be there in the sensation to feel it. Try stopping before you get to 180 degrees, or imagine that you are just hugging an elephant. Explore one arm at a time by imagining that your are throwing a frisbee. The feeling is that of uncoiling the inner line of the body/arm, not contracting the outer shoulder, as the energy continues in a line out through the fingers and into space.

Asana Practice: Track action of third chakra/solar plexus/samana vayu energy and distribute it evenly into upper limbs and head / and lowers limbs and tail. Begin with standing poses, through dog and variations to inversions, backbends, (Saturday), forward bends (Sunday), then sarvangasana, variations as inspired, savasana.

2014 YLT: 3rd Weekend Summary

Posted on May 4, 2014 by admin

Theme of Weekend 3 : What is Mind? (part 1)

Meditation: Heart Field followed by Hub of Awareness (see previous post).
Continuing to rest in non-dual emptiness (aka being, presence, Purusha, atman)
at the ‘hub’, while allowing the world to unfold. No need to repress or push the world away.

Pranayama Practice: Sama Vrtti and differentiating ribs, spine and diaphragm.

Asana Practice: Continue refining what we have learned in the first two sessions. From the meditation, tracking energy flow from heart to feet/earth and back, integrating into arms and skull, through crown chakra to the heavens, and back to the heart. More work with standing poses, dogs, and beginning to explore inversions, backbends, restoratives. How do yoga postures affect ‘mind states? How does our approach, our belief systems about the body, about practice, affect mind states? How are emotional energies affected?

Mantra/Chanting: Learn: 1. Invocation to Patanjali: 2. Om namste astu bhagavan…
3. Om saha navavatu… and 4. Purnamadah, purnamidam… (See below.)

Yoga Sutras: Questions arising from study group:

Question 1: Please comment on the use of mantras in one’s practice, especially ‘Om’. Are there any secrets to be found in the chanting of mantras? Maybe not secrets, just how does this work? How does this help our practice?
Answer: there are many layers to working with mantras, whether recited out loud, or silently in a practice known as japa. The most obvious is that the mantra provides a seed to focus the mind. This brings stability. When repeated over and over, the possibility of the mind dissolving into emptiness arises as the need to anticipate what might come next disappears. The aspect of mind known as manas (see below) continues the chanting and the buddhi can rest in silence. Another aspect is that each of the Sanskrit sounds have a specific vibration that affects the whole organism. The way the vowels and consonants are ordered creates waves of sound that bring coherence. Different mantras have different wave patterns. Om is the simplest and most powerful as it creates a very simple coherent circular or spherical vibration. The best way to explore is to try chanting in your practice. It will help keep you breathing, if nothing else!

Question 2: Please comment on ways to clarify the mind as mentioned in Sutras I-33 to I-39. Answer: Big question! Patanjali is very open minded about finding what works. Sutra 1-33 is worth a book in itself, but recognizes that negative emotional patterns and habits reek havoc on the quietness of the mind and suggests four practices, the Brahma Viharas, which are also an important part of Buddhist teaching. I-34 uses the stillness at the end of exhalation, possibly cultivated through pranayama. As the breath becomes more effortless, through asana as an example, the mind settles naturally. When the breath is still, the mind is quiet. The rest of these sutras are a bit esoteric, except for the last, where Patanjali says that anything that works for you can be an object of meditation.

Question 3: How do we relate ways to clarify the mind to the three gunas (sattva, rajas, and tamas)? A rajasic mind needs to quiet down. Longer exhalations and restorative poses are some ways to help. A dull mind needs activation, exercise, fresh air, backbends, movement to help bring the energy up. A sattvic mind is already there. Enjoy.

Main Theme: What do we mean by ‘mind’?
This a complex question that will be unfolded over three seperate weekends in the course, using Patanjali and other traditional perspectives as well as modern neuro-scientific understandings. In this introduction, we will look at the overall sense of mind and mind activity. In later weekends we will go into emotions and some cutting edge neuroscience. As we are working with Patanjali, it will be helpful to see how he looks at mind. Then we will compare that with Dan Siegel’s interpersonal neurobiology.

Samkhya, the philosophical foundation of the Yoga Sutras, describes mind, known in general as citta, as involving three distinct but interwoven processes.

The first process, known as manas (YS 1-35, II – 53, III-48), organizes sensory information, records and stores memory and allows for ‘auto-pilot’ actions. It is the bookkeeper, filer and office manager of the citta.

The ahamkara, literally the “I” maker, builds a self sense out of experiences and includes likes and dislikes, tendencies and habits. Although there is no direct mention of the ahamkara in Patanjali, it is implied in sutra I-4, vrtti sarupyam itaratra. Here Patanjali describes the general state of confusing the transient movements of mind, in other words, the functioning of the mind, with the immutable Purusha, the True Self in Samkhya. The ahamkara, sometimes called the ego in Western psychology, is an absolutely necessary aspect of a healthy mind. It is not the true nature of ‘I”, but can easily convince itself otherwise. We will develop this very important idea of “Self” later in the course.

The buddhi is the intelligence. This is cultivated in “mindfulness practice” and refers to awareness of what is arising in the present moment, analysis, and on going choice of action. This is in contrast with the manas, where decisions are made sub-consciously from habit and routine. In integration, buddhi and manas can work together skillfully, with the sub-routines operating in the background while modifications are made moment to moment. Reading is an example. As you read these words, you have previously learned a language with vocabulary and grammar and this foundation allows the intelligence to contemplate the meaning, looking for nuances and implications from the writer.

The word vrtti, mind activity, refers to the energetic nature of mind. Mind is not a noun, it is a verb. Mind is dynamic activity. The Self, or Purusha in the Sutras, is not the mind. According to Patanjali, mind activity, aka, energy/information flow, can come in three possible flavors: too much, too little, and just right, like the Goldilocks story. The Sanskrit term guna refers to energy in general, but here we will use it to examine mental energy. The first guna is rajas or the adjective form, rajasic, refers to action or movement; inertia of motion is name offered by Sir Isaac Newton. When out of balance, i.e., too much rajas, these energies will be in the form of chaos or aggresssiveness, and the mind field is disruptive and unstable. Tamas, or tamasic, refers to the opposite of movement, inertia of rest. When out of balance the stability of tamas degenerates into stagnation. Here the mind activity is sluggish or stupified.

In Sattva or sattvic states, mind activity is harmonious with a perfect, dynamic balance between movement and stability. This is an excellent definition of mental health, also known as integration. Dan Siegel, the acronym man, uses the word FACES to highlite the qualities demonstrated in an healthy integrated system, like the human nervous system. It is Flexible, Adaptable, Coherent, Energized and Stable. Just about every neuro-psychological disorder falls into one of two categories where the process on neural integration is disrupted: disorders of chaos (excess rajas) or rigidity (excess tamas).

In your practice, observe these aspects of mind activity. Learn to recognize them in action. Emotional self regulation is the key to mental health and the beginning of yoga. We could spend years exploring the dimensions of mental health, but this is a tiny beginning.

Dan Siegel, author of ‘The Developing Mind” and many other mind-based books, defines the mind as “an embodied and relational process that organizes the flow of energy and information.” “Embodied” recognizes the there is no mind-body split, although this split is often implied in modern psychological language. “Relational’ recognizes that we are embedded in relationships and mind does not exist in isolation, although the mind can often convince itself that this is so. The body is energy. Information is a highly complex form of energy and the self-organizing aspects of mind uses information to bring further levels of integration to maintain health and well being. Yoga taps into this process and develops and refines it further and further.

One of the most important types of mind activity is integration, described by Dan as ” the collaborative, linking functions that coordinate various levels of processes within the mind and between people.” (DM pg 301) It can also be described as the linking of differentiated systems to create something larger than the sum of the parts. Hand – eye coordination is an example of integration. The visual system and the kinesthetic system work together to allow a complex motor skill such as hitting or catching a baseball. These are sattvic mind states.

Reading is another example of integration. The retina registers light and dark patterns, the pattern recognition portion of the brain interprets the information into words, and the meaning making aspect draws conclusions, makes connections, inferences, etc. Now, If you can read Thai, you will understand that การให้ทานความรู้เป็นทานอันประเสริฐสุด says ‘Passing on knowledge is the greatest gift.” If you do not read the Thai script not, the forms do not convey any information.

The term samadhi, the primary practice of used in the Yoga Sutras, describes a state of relaxed focused attention directed onto the process of attention. Conscious attention is integrating, whether as mindful attending to the present, focal attention known as samadhi, or insight where attention rests in itself. These involve using a sustained sattvic flow of energy/information to develop and strengthen deeper and deeper states of integration. Yoga studies the process of attention and integration and refines this over and over again.

In “Mindsight” Dan Siegel defines eight domains of integration,
(and I add 1, dorsal/ventral). The first and most basic is:

Integration of Consciousness, which essentially is the definition of yoga. This refers to building skills to stabilize attention and then working with the global awareness of all aspects of our lives to help bring them into a state of harmony. Perceptions, bodily sensations, emotions, actions, relationships and our own thoughts are examined. The “Hub of Awareness” meditation is the key practice.

Next come the three ‘spatial’ domains, highly relevant to the somanauts/yoga students.

Horizontal Integration helps to link right and left brain activities. The right develops early on and involves spatial awareness, imagination, non-verbal communication, holistic thinking and more. The left brain develops later and is responsible for logic, linearity, literal thinking, written and spoken language and more. Read ” A Stroke of Insight” by Jill Bolt Taylor for a fascinating unfolding of some right brain/left brain skills and perspectives. If the linking between these hemispheres is blocked, the richness and complexity of life can be lost. Yoga poses and other forms of mindful movement help integrate right and left sides of the brain.

Vertical Integration refers to the vertical nature of the nervous system with nerves form the lower body ascending up through the spinal cord into the brain stem, the limbic structures and the cortex. People who ‘live in their heads’ are lacking in vertical integration. Hatha yoga brings the awareness and intelligence of the cells, organs, muscles and bones into conscious awareness and is thus a major practice of vertical integration.

Depth or Dorsal/Ventral Integration refers to the third and most challenging of the spatial directions, front to back. Most of us have very little perception of depth in the body. Head/tail and right/left are relatively easy, but we are pretty shallow from front to back. This becomes important as we dive into embryology and discover the tubular nature of structures. Without dorsal/ventral integration, we have no middle, no center. we are two dimensional. Breathing begins the process of discovering the inside that differentiates front from back. When e find the ‘expansion fields, we can take that feeling anywhere.

The next three involve temporal domains, where aspects past, present and future are integrated.

Memory Integration involves linking two basic types of memory. Implicit memory begins at conception if not before and encodes all the experiences the cell, enmbryo, fetus, baby encounters. These memories shape our behavior and relationships from way in the background. Explicit memory includes autobiographical memory, the sense that ‘I remember’ and often doesn’t arise until the second year of life. In a healthy individual the implicit encodings and our ‘remembering work together to help us stay in the present moment with awareness and sensitivity. Trauma can impair memory integration. PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder blocks the implicit experience of the trauma to become part of explicit memory. Thus a war veteran can hear a firecracker explode and instantaneously be thrown into the war zone, which is experienced as happening now.

Narrative Integration is bringing coherence to the telling of our own story. Interestingly, the narrative function resides in the left hemishere and the autobiographical memory in the left. The more we can use story to make sense of our experiences and our actions, especially those of our childhood, and bring coherence to our life stories, the better parents we will be.

Temporal Integration brings in the capacity of the pre-frontal cortex to anticipate the future and even the deaths of ourselves and loved ones. This can induce more than a fair amount of anxiety so mindfulness practice can bring some ease and relaxation around ‘not knowing’ and help us be more comfortable with uncertainty. Emptiness meditation also brings insight into the nature of birth and death.

State integration allows us to acknowledge the different ‘mind states’ we naturally go through during the cpurse of a day. A ‘mind state” is “the total pattern of activations in the brain at a particular moment in time.” DM pg 208. We can all recognize the difference between the states of deep sleep, dream sleep and waking. And during waking, we can be alert, agitated, meditative, relaxed etc. Each of these involves a pattern of brain activity which can often be demonstrated through the electrical patterns known as brain waves. Sometimes we can generate conflicting states or ones we find to be ‘unpleasant’. Rather than rejecting or trying to deny their existence, we see their presence and look more mindfully at their expressions, giving permission to have these states. Spiritual bypassing is an attempt to ignore, deny or avoid states that do not meet our ‘spiritual standards’. This is a very unhealthy approach. Compassion and spacious understanding are healing.

Interpersonal Integration recognizes that we are all ‘interbeing’ to use Thich Nhat Hahn’s term. We all are dependent upon others for comfort, survival, recognition, fun and more. Our brains have evolved to align with other brains, our minds with other minds, to create mind states of two and more beings entwined and attuned. This helps us stay grounded in the world. We learn to come together and separate. Sometimes those separations are smooth, sometimes they are ruptures, leaving psychic wounds. Learning how to repair these ruptures is crucial to all relationships.

om saha na vavatu
namaste astu
patanjali invocation

2014 YLT: 2nd Weekend Summary

Posted on May 1, 2014 by admin

Theme for Weekend # 2. An Introduction to Anatomy and Kinesiology

Class begins with: Heart Field Meditation,
followed by Dan Siegel’s Hub of Awareness Meditation

Sutras Studies: review I-1 to I-16, and II 46 – 48. Get a feel for basic vocabulary. Find a sutra or two you can work with practically.

Asana practice: Continue to refine energy flow from heart to feet, into earth/ground, and back up through core. Special attention to standing poses and dog pose. Refine action of feet, ankles, knees and hip joints to relieve unnecessary stress on spine and, using DFL as guide, track through all axes of movement through hips. Become more clear on the three basic movements of the pelvis and the femurs: saggital flexion and extension (forward and back bending); lateral flexion/extension or ‘fish body’ as seen in trikonasna, ardha chandrasana and parsvakonasana; and rotation or twisting as in revolved half moon, revolved triangle and side angle and parsvottanasana. .

Main Theme: Somatic based spiritual practice requires an understanding of soma, the embodied expression of spirit. This weekend we will start with the obvious, muscles/bones/connective tissue structures. looking for ways to work holistically, and later in the course bring in the organs, physiology and the cellular levels of consciousness. But first, an overview from a yogic perspective.

In the Vedic tradition, human ‘anatomy’ consists of three nested bodies:
1. The gross body (Sanskrit: sthula sharira) is the body of mass and weight. It is tangible, and includes all structures from muscles and bones to cells, water and more. Our key word here is ‘stability’, sthira in Sanskrit. (sthira sukham asanam, PYS II-46)

2. The subtle or energy body (Sanskrit: sukshma sharira) includes the energies of the body such as heat, electricity, motility and motion, including the physiological and psychological processes of aliveness. It can be directly felt, but is not ‘tangible’ like the gross body. Neither is it separate from the gross body, as matter, as Mr. Einstein points out, is just a very dense form of energy. The key words here are flow and fluidity, or sukha, sukham in Sanskrit.

3. The causal body (Sanskrit: karana sharira), seed of all seeds: No perfect English translation but rainbow light body or the body of limitlessness can be useful. Another way to consider this ‘body’ is as the organizing intelligence of the cosmos, manifesting as fields: gravity, electromagnetic, strong and weak nuclear. The key words here are space, spaciousness and light.

For a yogi, kinesiology, the study of movement, is more important than anatomy. The main principle of kinesiology is known as joint congruence, which states that any joint, whether still or in motion, is most stable and safe when the center of one of the bones is exactly centered on the opposite bone. This is where alignment in yoga meets kinesiology. If my hip joint is aligned properly, the center of the femur head will remain exactly centered on the mid-point of the acetabulum of the pelvis throughout any healthy movement. This implies that all the muscles and muscle groups in the region are in balance throughout movement. An unhealthy movement will disturb the alignment by contracting one or more muscles asymmetrically and pulling the femur slightly off center. This will be felt as having a ‘tight hip’. As we build perception and begin to feel our way through the sensations, we can start to use simple movements to re-align the hip joints. Here the energy body and gross body work as one and we will start by moving in and out of the basic yoga poses. See Notes from St. John for details on working in the poses.

For our anatomical enquiry into the gross body structures, we will approach the muscles and bones from a holistic perspective, using as our primary reference “Anatomy Trains” by Tom Myers. Anatomy tends to be taught by learning/memorizing the body as a series of parts: muscles, bones, organs, nerves, etc. This approach totally misrepresents the reality of the human body which is a living, dynamic, integrated presence. We will use Tom’s work as a map to begin to see and feel the fascial continuities that link and integrate the layers and levels of the body in action and perception. Later on in the course, we will take a deeper look at four levels or layers of fascia: the pannicular or superficial fascia; the axial fascia with anterior and posterior compartments; the meningeal fascia and the visceral fascia.

The key Anatomy Train line for yogis is the ‘deep front line’, or DFL, which allows us to connect the myofascia of the muscles with the visceral fascia of the gut body, as it includes the diaphragm and pericardium. This line integrates the core of the body from head to feet and is the root of tadasana, our primary standing pose.

1. Find the DFL origins in your feet. The heel bone is bypassed, so the gastroc/soleus muscles, which become the achilles tendon where it attaches to the heel, is not part of the action. Overusing these outer muscles is a habit that is difficult for beginner to overcome. Learn to be ‘on your toes’, which actually means to carry your weight on the tarsals and metatarsals with the heels very light. This allows instant movement in any direction and is the foundation for all skillful movements that begin with the legs. Watch a cat or dog as they move and notice their heels and wrists never touch the ground.

2. Feel the inner thighs awakening. We overwork the quads and hamstrings, neither of which are part of the DFL. The adductors can be taught to be engaged in trikonasana, parsvakonasana and ardha chandrasana. They are the ‘mediators of the legs, the muscles in the middle that bring a balanced energy flow. Find this. Repeat. Again.

3. The iliopsoas is a major player in the DFL’s healthy functioning, but these muscles tend to be overly contracted and isolated from the legs. Most lower back issues stem from this dissociation. By learning to slowly move in and out of the standing poses such as uttanasana and trikonasana, without collapsing the upper torso, we can begin to reconnect the psoas muscles with the rest of the DFL in the legs. Ida Rolf, pioneer somatic innovator described the psoas as linking walking and breathing, as the diaphragm is the next section of the DFL to be integrated. Moving in and out rather than holding brings the breath more clearly into focus. Most beginners ‘hold’ their breath if they are ‘holding’ a yoga pose. This is an unconscious habit that needs to be transformed asap.

4 Diaphragm: He we find a huge muscle dividing abdomen from chest cavity, attaching to ribs, spine, heart. It has opening for the blood vessels and esophagus, but is pretty strong and relatvely unconscious. Our work in exploring the breath will help differentiate ribs from diaphragm and learn to recognize the pressure cavities that play a major role in the shape they take on. Most important is to feel an upward lift to the lower dome of the diaphragm coming up from the feet. The diaphragm should ride on the aliveness of the feet through the integration of the DFL.

Now Into Skull and Upper Limbs: As the diaphragm receives support from below, the intercostals can awaken and support the ribs from the inside. this then relieves pressure on the scalenes from trying to hold up the front ribs. The shoulders can also relax and the arm connections through the blood vessel highways can now be felt. Hands can connect directly to the feet, head to the tail.

From the awakening and refining of the DFL, we can see the role of some of the other Anatomy Train Lines. The Superficial Back Line, or SBL, and the Superficial Front Line, or SFL, work as a pair when integrated with the DFL. In a forward bend such as uttanasana, the SBL lengthens if the DFL maintains its core support and low. In a backbend, the SFL lengthens, again if the DFL is supporting. Notice the SFL breaks at the pelvis. The quads need to lengthen for everyone. They chronically over work. The upper SFL is trickier as the abdominals are often weak and the inner muscles of the chest wall to tight. There needs to be two differetn action for most beginning students to fully open the SFL.

The lateral lines, right and left, are opened in the lateral poses like trikonasan, parsvakonasana and ardha chandrasana, again with support form the DFL.

The spiral lines can be explored in standing twists, using the support of a wall for extra clarity.