Saturday, our day off..

So, in the Ashtanga tradition we take Saturdays off, to rub ourselves down with oil which helps to relieve tension in our muscles and our mind as well, to have a full day of integration of the insights that come from our practice. I believe also to have the day to practice feeling okay without doing the physical practice, which can be a crutch to our well being. If you practice yoga you know that it makes you feel better, it does. But you also may never take a day off from the asana practice to be able to practice those good feelings just by using the power of your mind, which all said is what yoga is anyway, right? Yogas Citta Vrtti Nirodhah=yoga is the cessation of fluctuations of the mind. So we're using the asana practice to calm the nervous system down so that we can enact the practice of the yamas and niyamas, google them, I may write about them some day but their interpretation is neverending through the eyes of many different individuals, so I'll save my opinion for another time. So today, I slowly woke up, or rather my bowels which move very quickly and frequently here, woke me up and I lay down for a bit longer after answering their call. The sun was just coming up, which by our standards in Missouri is late at almost 7am, but it was lovely. The women were just starting to sweep their front stoops, the birds were calling their neverending call, a sound I can't explain as we just have nothing to compare it to (but it's lovley), and so I finally got up, did a neti pot, put oil in my mouth to pull with, got on Facebook, answered some messages, meditated, did pranayama, chanted to Lakshmi for abundance,did my castor oil bath, showered, washed a few shirts while I was in there chilled for a bit then left to meet a friend for breakfast at Khushi, thinking I would get a chai beforehand. I was sitting on the steps at Khushi waiting for him and decided to write in my journal. What I realized while writing there was that everyone here seems to be so distraught and dealing with all of their shit, so quickly, almost as soon as you get here. Here, we are so outside our comfort zone that our emotions, thoughts, our very inner being is so close to the surface and we're just not used to that. At home we sit very deeply in our comfort zone and when you're there your emotions allow themselves to get buried, sometimes fairly deeply and so we have to postulate, or take a few days to see how we feel about things as they come up. Here, very much outside our comfort zone, they sit near the surface and when something comes up, out the words and feelings come very much before we've given anything a second thought, so we feel odd because in the west we just aren't used to dealing with them like this. So now I'm thinking of how to maintain this closeness and intouchness with my emotions and even with my body when I get home. Do I move? Somewhere new in St. Louis, or completely away from St. Louis? Do I shave my head and become a monk, or maybe never cut my hair again and become a monk? Do I get lots of tattoos and peircings? Get my point? It's about taking myself outside my comfort zone, daily, not just sporadically as we tend to do in the midwest, if at all, but daily. This too can be part of my yoga practice and should be as far as I'm concerned. I make my students uncomfortable daily, so I have to do this with myself as well. One person suggested I start a Sanskrit study group once I'm back, to keep my studies of this lovely, ancient language going, but to spark the beginnings of their interest in it. One thing I'll probable also do is change all or most of classes to the Ashtanga practice, which is something I can't not teach, even though I'm not authorized or certified (yet), what else can I do? What makes you uncomfortable? Do you avoid it completely, or embrace it and dive in? One thing I love about the Lululemon company is their manifesto, which consists of many one liners about embracing life more fully, but the one I've always resonated with the most is Do Something Once A Day That Scares You... Do you?