January Class Notes

Om Namaha Shivaya!

Blessings of ANUGRAHA (grace). Yes, this was on a yoga mat at the studio and ha, ha, ha! I even put it on there myself long ago. Notice how things weave from forgetfulness to remembrance or from concealment and revelation all the time, and back again.

Our blog is up and running. Let’s check this weekly for new updates from me and each other. This will be my main way of communicating with you outside of class. Any questions to further your clarity of topics discussed over the weekends please post here and I will respond and others can help and chime in too.

I’m going to see how the first run of homework goes and I may change it so that you actually just post your answers on here. I’ll keep you informed on that decision, until then write out your answers and hand to me our next teachers weekend.

Thank you all for attending and showing up ready and enthusiastic to dive into the many aspects of yoga. Thank you for being brave and standing up and starting your first step into practice teaching. I flashed back later to my first actual teaching experience. I stood up in front of everyone and froze. No words come out of my mouth for what felt like an eternity. A local teacher jumped up (Thank goodness she happened to be there!) and stood next to me and started feeding me lines. Then, every time I got them into a pose I froze again! So needless to say, those poor students held poses till they dropped!  It was a very choppy and disconnected teaching on my part.  So don’t worry!  It gets easier and smoother each time. Be patient with yourself and allow yourself to be where you are at right now.

These are some key points and random extras from the weekend lecture:

Yoga emphasizes and deeply encourages the validation of your beliefs through direct experience or personal intuitive experience of the divine. Always seek deeply within yourself to have experiences from which you are reading or being taught. It’s just not enough to be a seeker. We also want to be a finder. This is the only way doubts will truly vanish.

Just as you cannot experience love, joy or peace from just someone describing it alone, you have to experience it to fully understand it. It is the same with self-realization, god realization, nature of your mind, body, spirit.

Notice the quiet spaces where inspiration, insights, intuition and knowledge bubble up, then you can test those revelations using the instruments of the outer world. Very much like a science. Get inspiration for a theory and then test it out. The instruction manual for life is inside.

Don’t get caught up in words, what’s the essence of what’s being spoken or conveyed. Try to find the common ground. Unity, bridge the gap. This is important when talking to and connecting with your students. Belief systems might actually be aligned but your wording may be different.

The core belief in yoga is that everything is connected and apart of or born out of one. From the one we get the many. From consciousness we get more diversified forms of the same consciousness in denser and denser expressions. From the one we get the 3 (sattva, rajas, tamas) from the 3 we get the 5 (in order: ether, air, fire, water, earth), from the 5 we get all the manifest reality we see and experience. I used the analogy of the lamp with the coverings over it. The veils of compressed and substantial consciousness cover our full experience of the one.

Your current state of mind creates your reality. Mind in one state (happiness, peace, sattvic) experiences time quickly and the world in a more positive light. Mind in an agitated state (rajasic) time moves more slowly and the world can appear frightening or bad. Mind in a depressed or lethargic state (tamasic) may only see darkness.

The 3 gunas are qualities of nature--the first stirrings out of the primordial substratum. It is the potential form from which all matter, energy and the mind are born.  These 3 qualities/expressions create the 5 elements.  Whenever there is a predominance of one we perceive and relate in the world through that quality.

 When sattva is predominant, the main expression is happiness, peace, contentment, clarity, light, knowledge, intelligence, balanced action, spiritual potential, consciousness. When applied to Anusara principles: sattva is remembrance= opening to grace.

In the rajasic state, it is restless, passionate, energy to create shifts, metabolism, activity, change, energy, fire, heat, life potential, breath, prana. When applied to Anusara principles: rajas is engagement =muscular energy.

In a tamasic state, delusion, laziness, inertia and fogginess predominate, matter potential. When applied to Anusara principles: tamas is disengagement = organic energy.

We have all these 3 elements within us. It’s not about eradicating rajas and tamas but encouraging there proper time and place. We need the heaviness and fogginess of tamas to help us sleep. If have too much rajasic energy it would prevent us from sleeping.  We can be a witness to these qualities and how they are governing your experience of the world.

Grace embodies as you. It is your birthright to feel it and express it in its fullness. You are born enlightened/perfect. In the play of rajas and tamas we get distracted and forgetful of this birthright. In Yoga we optimize balanced action; alignment and harmony with nature and with ourselves. To help with clarity we do practices that encourage sattva.  In the class room we minimize distractions, cell phones, face book, work, and family to help with clarity. The yoga in the class room is far easier than the yoga out in the world. Our practice should help us transition into our lives and teach us how to find balanced action out there also.

Looking forward to teaching and learning along side you this year,

Melonie