Cultivate Mindfulness in Life and Yoga Practice

Let’s Count it!

Aristotle had a hypothesis: women have more teeth than men! For almost 2000 years the dogma remained unchallenged until someone had a brighter idea. He said, “Let’s count it” A revolutionary insight. Reflection on age-long practices often unravel truths. Recently, I gave a presentation “Plant pigments: beyond aesthetics” at St. Xavier University on plant pigments, flavors, fragrances, artificial food colorants, their drawbacks and alternatives. I was hungry after the question/ answer session and thought to eat some cookies. While I was about to bite one, a student raised her hand. Her question caught me off-guard: “you told the issues with artificial food colorants, why are you eating the cookies loaded with those”. I was embarrassed. Another student saved me with another question on the subject matter. I ignored the first and tried to answer the second one; the first one persisted. To make the story short, I had to give up those cookies. The seminar sailed through unchartered territories- meditation, yoga, mindfulness, organic, vegan…I was challenged. Challenging our thoughts, believes and practices is the beginning of realization to transform the body, mind and soul. Now you know where I am going, hold on.

Once I met a faithful vegan; enjoyed the discussion on the science; and felt an urge to follow it.  His spouse termed the habit a headache. Deliberation with others on the subject crystallized my thoughts: it is expensive, and it’s hard to balance the demand of our body and food sources. I took the challenge and decided to go vegan this advent season- economically and (mostly) transparent to the household and parties. One of my friends asked, “what the poor plants did, in the past thirteen years (my career as a plant scientist) to hate them so much?” I never thought so. I don’t have an agenda driven by any faith or fallacy. My goal is to analyze food matrices in the molecular level and find alternatives to meat, fish and dairy products respecting the wallet; challenge myself beyond what I have been doing. Remember: finding solutions to challenges is the beginning of intelligence. (So…that’s is your agenda: Yes, agreed.)

I happened to share my thoughts with two of my friends, Sarah Giuliani and Kate Schwatz- both have a good understanding on the food, food ingredients and alternative sources for proteins, amino acids, fats and vitamins. Sarah suggested it may be good idea to rename veganism due to various stigma attached to it. I am planning to dig little deeper into this topic in this season and will share some of the recipes and thoughts of Sarah and Kate here. I am going call this “Eating Mindfully”, segue for the theme of my yoga classes for this month. I consider mindfulness as a tool to create kindness, reduce anxiety, depression and ADHD. In the context of yoga, I was specific on the mindfulness of executing yoga poses, practicing breathing and quantifying foci. This time, I incorporate food into that puzzle.

Yoga, meditation, pranayama (breathing) techniques, corpse pose, Mindful Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and prayer could all lead you to mindfulness.

How to create mindfulness in our yoga practice.

1.             Make breathing mindful. Explore the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and targets in your breathing. Triangular, SWOT (4-4-6-2) breathing is an excellent tool: inhale for 4 seconds; hold for 4 seconds; exhale for 6 seconds and hold for another 2 seconds. Exaggerate the actions of thoracic and abdominal muscles. Bring into your mind the complementary benefits (internal organ massage, sensitization of endocrine system…) of deep breathing. Redefine breath, if you may: breathing is nothing but our ability to enhance the three dimensional capacity of lungs.

2.            Make poses BEADED: In every pose scan your body to see how it acts, how the energy flows (close your eyes and listen), how you are working with your body; how you are directing and elaborating your poses to yield the dynamic stability you need to stand or sit in a pose for a long time (if needed) without any discomfort. By definition, yoga should be stable and comfortable.

3.            3. Make all foci -external, internal (locks)  and cognitive (chakras) - mindful

Hope you see you, hear your thoughts and share mine.

Love,

Jay

Synthesis in Yoga

Synthesis in Yoga

“I keep all recipes handy when I cook and synthesize my own that suits my taste”, a friend told me. Recipes, perfected by personalization, could be modified to fit our palate adding to an ever-expanding world of culinary art.  I happened to be in a discussion on innovations in television. OLED screens was the topic. I remained oblivious to those techies with jargons flying over my head. My time with Best buy (and YouTube- my go-to place for similar research!) told me, “OLED is the latest in television.” Then why one brand significantly expensive than the other if all have similar display technologies. “The expensive one is using smart technology to display the scene”, another friend told me. I was bowled again. He also mentioned about machine learning, artificial intelligence…and dissected recent advances in technology to the dummy’s level. I was fascinated how algorithms concocted sensible judgements based on data; how data driven we are; and how machines could “think”, and potentially, like us- to form ideas, opinions, judgements, reasoning based on our experience.

A parallel story materialized in my mind- the evolution of yoga. From its humble beginning with 74 poses, this art, science and the philosophy evolved into millions of yoga poses with the infusion of anatomy, physiology, energy centers, internal locks, and the knowledge on the intricacies of human brain function. Yogis ventured to innovation sprouting crowd-sourcing. We learned from the data (experiences and documented ones).  Disseminate poses to the lowest level, listen to your body, be innovative and be a master yogi; open your mind (unlike machine learning, we don’t need anybody to feed the data, we can do it yourself!) and be a synthetic yogi!

I have taken detox as the theme of my classes for now. I encourage you to be innovative and synthesize your own poses listening to your body. I will suggest few poses that you may personalize in your journey on detox (make them your veer-bhadras). Remember: yoga is limitless. Detox through yoga practice is an ever evolving science; yoga poses with unique characteristics quality them to be in the realm of detox. Listen, learn, focus, practice, meditate and make them your own, the rest is guaranteed in the path and promise of yoga. Few suggestions:

A)      Various breathing techniques utilizing as many muscle s and muscle groups. Please be mindful on the complementary benefits of deep breathing- internal organ massage; endocrine (thyroid, parathyroid and thymus system massages.

B)      Poses that access abdominal muscles and organs. Complement them by coupling with flexional and rotational poses. Utkatasana, parivritha utkatasana, januseershasana, parivritha januseershasana are examples. Look for “parivritha” in the name, it is bound to have some detox benefits.

C)      Poses that activate lymph nodes. Fish, veerasna, suptaveerasana  are examples.

D)      Inversions, preferably after C.

E)       Enhance basal metabolism by recruiting major muscle/ muscle groups in poses. Warriors and goddess are examples.

F)       Enhance aerobic capacity. One of my favorite pose is pavanamukhtasana.

G)      “Therapeutic duo” combining flexion and extension in the lower abdominal to upper thoracic areas. Combine dwipata pidasana, sethu bandhanasa, matsyasana and backbends with pavanamukthasana and halasana.

Accessing all these poses in a day, a week or a month may be hard to (even) seasoned yogis; now you know why I say, “Yoga is a journey”. Blessed to be with you!

Love,

Jay

  Semantics versus Substance

I recently conducted a workshop on “Heal the vagus nervous system to heal the body and mind”. This is how I presented the theme:

“One of the parasympathetic nervous systems, Vagus, manages our ability to control stress, anxiety, depression, body image issues, and behavioral disorders (OCD, ADHD...). Vagus nervous system represent the mind body connection. Sensitizing this system by mindful diaphragmatic breathing, mindfulness and meditation is found to heal mind and body. In this one hour session, we will explore the benefits of deep diaphragmatic breathing to sensitize the Gut Brain Axis (GBA) and the role of meditation and mindfulness to create Gamma Amino Butyric Acid (GABA) to calm and relax the body and mind”

I was surprised when twenty five percent of the people did not show up on the day of the workshop. I had the chance to talk to one of them. “I will be judged if I had attended”, he said. “The idea is not entirely deal with the issues we may face, it is all about prevention and to be proactive”, I said. I had been there many times and I realize the semantics is as important as substance and the purpose. “May be you should’ve said, breathing exercise to relax”, my friend told and I heard her.

A week after the workshop, a young man (who attended it) came to me and said, “The breathing worked like a magic, I am able to focus, relax and get off the gloominess of anxiety. Why our physicians and therapists do not encourage these ancient wisdom”. I have an answer and being a hypothesis I would rather not spell it out.

Anyway, I took “Healing the Vagus Nervous System” as the theme of my classes for the past one month. Vagus nervous system is a wandering bidirectional system innervating the internal organs in the gut area. There are five things we may be able to incorporate in our yoga practice, life, to achieve this. This is a practice to stay away from sympathetically active flight, fight, freeze or faint to parasympathetically active realm of feed, relax and happy.

1    1. Deep Diaphragmatic Breathing: Diaphragmatic breathing massages internal organs and activates this bi-directional wandering nervous system. It also massage thyroid, parathyroid, thymus ad prostate glands. It sensitizes the manipura chakra (No…the solar plexus energy center!)

          2.  Recreate, Strengthen and Maintain spinal curves: There are number of simple pose combinations (therapeutic sequences) to achieve this: Cat-Cow-down-dog; pyramid-crescent lunge; bridge(s)-apanasana.

3    3. Detox poses extending upper thoracic area: Anytime when you flex and rotate the lower abdominal area, it is a detox pose. The best way to recognize them is look for the word “parivritha” in it. These poses amplify the internal energy that will seek a path to move up through Gut Brain Axis (GBA). Mindfully executing these poses tone GBA

4    4. Engage the chin lock, if possible, while executing poses: Locking the chin helps to massage the vagus nervous system passing through the neck.

5    5. Be mindful in breathing and poses. Practice SWOT breathing to counts of 4-4-6-2. There definitely seem to be a reason why the military folks are using this breathing to help those feet on the ground.

I am planning to continue the theme for another week. Hope to see you.

P. S. Help your students, friends, colleagues to discover their soul, the purpose of their life. Our soul, creativity and talents are like timid wild animals. Seek them gently with care to ground them. Try to connect with them and accept them with love. Our goal is to help them to discover that purpose. The rest will fall in place. It means a lot when you say Namaste,

So,

Namaste!

Jay.

 

“We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think…with our thoughts we make the world” Buddha

Our life is riddled with elusive questions and, sometimes, they remain as puzzle to us. The discovery of that enigma, our real obligation, leads to a cascade of events unlocking the door to our destiny; mindfulness is the path to that discovery. In silence, in meditation we pave the path to mindfulness leading to the goal we are destined to.

If mindful breathing, poses and foci form the triangular base of yoga, the converse might be true too: yoga should cultivate mindfulness. Nurturing mindfulness through yoga practice and in our life is the theme of our practice, the last one, in the park this Sunday at 8.30 am. Hope you will be able to make it.

Here are three ways one could cultivate mindfulness (and this is what we would do):

1. Make breathing mindful. Use thoracic and abdominal muscles efficiently. Bring into your mind the complementary benefits (internal organ massage, sensitization of endocrine system…) of deep breathing. Redefine breath, if you may: breathing is nothing but our ability to enhance the three dimensional capacity of lungs. Deep breathing in mindfulness triggers parasympathetic nervous system stimulating “rest and digest” and “feed and breed” mechanisms in contrast to “fight or flight” stimulation triggered by sympathetic nervous system and shallow breathing.

2. Make poses BEADED: In every pose scan your body to see how the body acts or behaves, how the energy flows (close your eyes and listen), how you are working with your body; how you are directing and elaborating your poses to yield the dynamic stability you need to stand or sit in a pose for a long time (if needed) without any discomfort. By definition, yoga should be stable and comfortable.

3. Deploy external, internal and cognitive foci in yoga practice.

All these accompanied by a live soul music rendition by Tey! Hope you see you.

Love,

Jay

P. S 1: Mindfulness reduce anxiety and depression; in children mindfulness improve test score, awareness and attitude; it help adults to succeed in all realms of their activities.

P. S 2: When I first set the time at 7.30 am, they told me, “it is too early and too cold”; I changed the time to 8.30, now they say, “It’s too late and too hot”…haha. We, still, are children. Good news for a yogi!

Yoga Practice in the Park.

In “I feel pretty”, an image conscious adult played by comedienne Amy Schumer revered her reflection in the mirror. The confusion in her mind after an accident and the ensuing drama was fun to watch. What impressed me was the message: be yourself. In the end, two resounding questions remain: “who are you?” and “what were/are you thinking?” We all had been there at some point and strive to reset. Removing the ignorance of conditioned existence is the goal of yoga, a path we tread through detox, strength, balance and the mindfulness.

I have set “reinventing through yoga” as the theme of Lokah Samastha Sukhino Bhavanthu (LSSB) event this year as part of International Yoga Day on June 21^st. I am excited to organize the morning yoga practice this year too- on June 3^rd, 10^th, and 17^th from 7.30 -8.30 AM in the Cambridge Chase Park in Aurora! (1359 Haversham Dr., Aurora, IL). No yoga experience is needed- just you, your breath and a mat; rest, covered.

There are umpteen definitions of yoga in the modern world: yoga helps to stretch, bend, flex and get the full the range of motion of body to enjoy the life to its fullest to the more philosophical one- yoga helps to clean your mind, body and spirit. This clean trio enhances their union; the union we are intended to be in the first place when we are designed. It’s a beckoning to that original design. The mind, body and spirit cleansing through grace, grounding, balance, humility, strength, ahimsa (non-violence), swadhyaya (self- teaching) mindfulness and pranayama will be reflected in these three weekends. Remember: “Sharing, listening and building community builds collective resilience…” The opportunity to watch, observe and learn in a group setting makes one to hone the skill, cultivate passion and develop perseverance – the key for success. This is the plan:

Day 1: Cleansing through yoga. 7.30-8.30 AM on June 03 2018: We will practice various breathing techniques and detox poses. End the practice with meditation.

Day 2: Warrior in you! 7.30-8.30 AM on June 10, 2018: A smooth flow incorporating warrior poses depicting the grace we seek, stability we need, balance we foster, humility we nurture and the ensuing exaltation in yoga practice (and life). We will end the practice with Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).

Day 3: Yoga for Balance. 7.30-8.30 AM on June 17, 2018: Beyond the physical, strength means our ability to face influences that may affect us- it is our ability to “Prevent the deviation of mind”. We will practice Pranayama techniques; poses and counter poses in sequence (including sun salutation and moon salutation)

Three of my good friends (Pradeep, Karen and Tey) would also lead the classes. Karen is a Life/ Wellness Coach and certified yoga instructor. Her yoga practice embraces ashtanga philosophy, pranayama, meditation and self-love in a nurturing ambiance. Tey teaches classical Hatha based on the International Sivananda Yoga Vendanta practice. As a recording artist, Tey has produced eleven albums, three of which feature Meditative Spiritual Music. You may find her at www.teymusic.com  We are planning for a live music yoga on 17^th. “Yoga does not just change the way we see things, it transforms the person who sees it”, believes Pradeep.  Pradeep has made yoga his way of life. His students follow the same path to benefit from the millennium old treasure to the humankind.

It’s an opportunity to synthesize your philosophy and vision on yoga; and an occasion to interact with a group of committed people who believe in its benefits and practice it with dedication; it’s a "crowdsourcing" in yoga. Hope to see you all.

Love,

Jay

Let it go…

I struggle to explain Prathyahatra - the least known limb in ashtanga yoga- in my yoga classes. “It’s a bridge between what we bring to the yoga practice (asana) and what we get out of it (meditation), it’s the withdrawal of the senses into the mind like a turtle withdraw the limbs into the shell, it’s the withdrawal from sensations and associations which could be excruciating in the beginning”, I say. Let those pass you, let it part with you, a brighter side awaits you.

“The wind is howling like this swirling storm inside

couldn’t keep it in, heaven knows I've tried” (“Let it go”, from Disney’s Frozen) I never thought a Disney song would become handy to teach the philosophy of Prathyahara.

My long time mentor and boss left the corporation recently. Having worked with despots to control-freaks, it was a loss for me. I met him recently over the counter in a bar. When asked for the last piece of advice, he said, “It is hard to let things go especially when you’re at the helm. It is one of the hardest decision we may make. Train yourself for that”. Changes are permanent, embrace it, he added. Losses are excruciating; preparing for that is art, science, psychology and medicine. We may face those situations at work, in friendships and relationships.

I am ready; let it go; let all storms pass through; don’t let it paralyze you; it will make you stronger (“What doesn’t kills you makes you stronger”, Friedrich Nietzsche.) Sometimes, it’s a strength to surrender and let that go.

Love,

Jay

(“Contentment is not the fulfilment of what you want, it’s the realization of how much you already have”, unknown)

Resilience through Yoga

Resilience through Yoga

“Sharing, listening and building community builds collective resilience…” expounds Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook in her new book Option B. One of my friends recently asked, “If you are so passionate of yoga and want to practice yoga mindfully (she took a jab at me there!)  Why don’t you practice at home?” I had an answer and now a convincing one. I had written about the importance of practicing in a group setting in the past. Talent, effort, skill, passion and perseverance are key to success. Studies have shown that human being absorb thoughts, practices and skills of the group they hang out and adapt to it. The opportunity to watch, observe and learn in a group setting makes one gritty; it creates herd immunity.

Having a home practice is also equally important:

• A dedicated and ritualistic routine makes any practice effortless and we cultivate a discipline.
•  It helps to explore your mind, body and spirit and challenge at your own comfort.
•  It is an opportunity for teach yourself. One of the key component of ashtanga yoga is “Swadhyaya”- teach yourself.
• Challenge your poses. Finding solutions to the challenges is the beginning of your intelligence.
• At home you are the Queen and the King; the Guru and the Sishya; and the teacher and the student. A good teacher is the best student.

This year I changed the way to set theme for my yoga instruction. Rather than dwelling deeper into a theme for weeks, the new spiraling themes address several benefits of yoga preparing the participant for a home practice. Unless driven by a dedicated commitment, a home practice becomes a daunting task for many. Monotony coupled with boredom and lack of motivation seem to be the reasons for this non-adherence. With millions of yoga poses and the myriad of ways to access a pose, boredom may easily be alleviated. The four notches in my spiral theming are detox, strength, balance and mindfulness. If we align proper qualifiers for each theme, picking up easy and comfortable poses become easy and with practice they transform as your second nature. The qualifiers for the themes are:

1.     Detox: A) Various breathing techniques including Bhastrika and Kapalabhathi pranayama. B) Poses that access abdominal muscles and organs. Complement them by coupling with flexional and rotational poses. C) Poses that activate lymph nodes. D) Inversions, preferably after C. D) Enhance basal metabolism by recruiting major muscle/ muscle groups in poses. E) Enhance aerobic capacity.

2.     Strength: A) Explore and engage core (abdominal) muscles. B) Hold BEADED poses longer. C) Improve aerobic capacity by breathing techniques and poses designed for this. D) Execute poses to isolate muscles/ muscle groups to strengthen them.

3.     Balance: A) Pranayama techniques. B) Poses and counter poses in sequence.

4.     Mindfulness: A) Mindful breathing. B) BEADED poses. C) External, Internal and Cognitive focuses. D) Synchronize the breath and movement in vinyasa.

5.     Comfortable execution of these themes in your practice should set the stage for a dedicated home practice.

I plan to write on these themes later and hope to see you in one of my classes.

Love,

Jay