Friday, December 14, 2018

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

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