Yoga No Boundary

Every once in a while I have to back up and cover the basics with even my advanced students… actually even with myself. Of the basics- I consider four points to be used in every posture, every time.
These are- 1) internal muscular locks (bandha)  2) throat breathing (ujjayi 3) eye focus points (drishti) 4) inner smiling (shambhavi )

Each of these could fill the pages of an entire book so I’ll confine this post to a particular way of doing drishti…

First off- Ashtanga yoga classifies 9 “official” drishti points – right toe/left toe, over right shoulder/over left shoulder, navel, tip of the nose, center of forehead, right hand/left hand – although really, wherever you snap your mind to, internally or externally becomes a drishti.

There are the official places that are listed in the books of where to look when doing which posture.. some have rationale, some seem arbitrary. For example, when looking at the tip of the nose, it is said to connect internally to the root chakra, which may stimulate the lift of kundalini energy to rise. Maybe…You can also practice by simply looking up when you inhale and down when you exhale. Drawing the eyes to a specific point builds internal heat through the power of concentration. It’s much like the mechanism of a magnifying glass.

So looking, focusing strongly will build heat and the inner smiling of shambhavi mudra releases the heat, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

 The WAY we look when doing a drishti is not to look like you’re trying to see something… when you look at your thumbs, you don’t have to analyze the color of your nail polish. You look but you don’t look if that makes any sense…

 Try looking at the following sentence while opening your peripheral vision so you can simultaneously see the walls and whatever else is around you…

MY HEART IS OPENING

Did you notice the subtle effect on your mind? Not yet? Stare a little longer…

 when we use the peripheral vision, the conscious mind slows down and the unconscious opens up. Your unconscious mind is what is taking care of your heart beat, breathing, and blood pressure while you read this, and you don’t have to even think about it. It also is able to catch ALL the details coming in through your five senses even if you consciously don’t know them. For example, your unconscious mind registered the nametag of the person who made your coffee this morning, even if you have no idea consciously.

 I mention this because yoga is a process of getting out of the head and into the heart, into the present moment. The conscious mind is the head, the unconscious is the Self, in the moment. So look, but don’t look when you do dristhi. You’ll find your concentration better and at the same time, more open, more at peace.

Till next time,

Adrian Cox

Beyond just a study of our own primal behaviors of mating, and territory marking, you can learn a lot of things watching animals. You may even find some useful attitudes and postures to adopt. Ancient yogis certainly seemed to think so; large numbers of yoga postures have been named after our various friends in the animal kingdom.  We have the crow, the eagle, the cat, the cow, the horse, and of course the dog. Each of these postures acts like a physical, internal feng shui – when you physically mimic these postures, you not only gain that animals prowess, you also induce an internal energy pattern of the creature. I’ll leave it to you to debate if there is benefit in being like a cow, but they certainly are peaceful and it’s for these ends that we coined the hip and shoulder opener called the cow-faced pose.

If you love dogs like I do, you can observe that when they awake from napping, they will stretch towards their front legs and then back to the hind legs – for which we have appropriated as the upward facing dog and downward facing dog yoga postures.  Even a passing interest in yoga and you know these postures- I myself couldn’t count the number of times in the past twenty years that I have done, or even said the words “inhale, upward dog, exhale downward dog”.  I doubt canines feel any intellectual property issue here; they’d likely to agree with you that it just feels really good to do. And it’s for that reason; there isn’t a day that goes by without me behaving like a dog.

Recently I also realized that a dog has even more to teach us about concentration- that strength to hold your mind at one point, to the exclusion of all other things. Concentration is a desired skill in yoga practice because if you have no concentration there will be no meditation, and without meditation, the true aim of yoga- absorption- will not be attained. That doesn’t make concentration some special, sacred skill however. If a dog can do it, you can too.

My dog meditation teacher
(Swami Busterami)

The most shining example of good concentration would be a dog I know named Buster. Buster is totally obsessed with food, to the exclusion of all other concerns. Needless to say, the dog is fat. It seems even basic dog-loyalty isn’t there; provided the enemy had something that smells nice in an audibly crinkling bag I’m sure Buster could be persuaded to leave his post.

One morning after I had been teaching these very subjects of concentration and meditation to a group of human students, I turned up at my friend’s house with an extra noisy paper bag of warm, aromatic, deep-fried bananas. I made sure the crunching noises and my sighs of pleasure were audible as I savored my breakfast with extra slow enthusiasm. I began taking pleasure in teasing him. I couldn’t resist, it was just so important to him.

Buster was quickly entranced, hypnotized as he followed every movement of my hand from the bag to my mouth with the most perfect, rapt concentration. The funniest thing was, I had just left a classroom full of intelligent, paying people who are genuinely interested in yoga, but they always seemed to half-get the point I was teaching: that the best foundation for success in yoga- and life is strong concentration.

It might be a stretch to say that Buster or any dog is approaching concentration as a platform for self-development as we do in yoga, but according to the definition in the established bible of yoga, the yoga sutras, this dog has it mastered.  The author of the text, Patanjali, wrote over 3,000 years ago that;

“Concentration is fixing your mind at one point or region, meditation is a continual steady flow of attention towards that same point, and yoga is when the object of meditation engulfs the meditator, and self-awareness is lost”.  I tell you; when I looked in the dog’s eyes, he had become the banana. It was his entire reality.

Concentration is not the penultimate condition of enlightenment, as you must further consider what you are concentrating upon. It is however, totally necessary for success in life. Along with many children in the late 80’s, I had been diagnosed with poor attention span: ADD. Can you blame us? Advertising and video games had done a fine job in training the brains of the youth to be distracted constantly.  Psychologists just labeled it with a three-letter acronym. Maybe it was a ploy to sell more Prozac or Ritalin but given the way things are digressing, the government and the big business probably should conspire to dispense free drugs. Or teach our nation’s youth to do yoga?

As a result, most of you have experienced firsthand how being easily distracted leads to mediocre results. Lose concentration on your lover and they slap you. Lose concentration on business and it fails you. Lose concentration on study and you flunk. The inverse is also true; all domains flower with focus.

The good news is that concentration is like a muscle that gets stronger with practice. Use your breath, a project, a mantra, or really anything else- as long as you understand that with deep concentration, the object of concentration leaves its own impression upon the mind. In other words, you become what you think about most of the time. If you’re like Buster, simply finding something that is attractive may be all that it takes. For the real flowering of human consciousness, discipline and a higher ideal will transform yourself and the world around you.  And that’s the joy of being human, because you have the freedom to act like an animal yet create and think like a God!

Till next time,

Adrian Cox

Director, yoga elements studio

The results of the studies have come in, do yoga and you will look and feel better.

It seemed but only a short while ago that yoga was a “new” trend in the minds of many in Bangkok, a novelty destined to have its rise and inevitable fall. Magazine articles would be angled to show yoga in it’s pure physical form only, and that if you started now you would look young, lean, and sexy in only a few sessions. Although it is good to have a “get in the door” policy, selling yoga purely for getting a nice butt is not really exploring it’s full potential. Yoga is really a time-tested and reliable science of raising one’s awareness with the side-effect of radiant health.

These days, most people know that yoga is a meditative discipline and has a physical side to it. Still though, even some of my long-term students struggle with what yoga is precisely. It’s many things, with many people defining it, but really, it’s up to you how you want to approach it. Yoga can be used like a sport, a philosophy, and even a method of therapy. It is a multi-armed discipline but with a common goal: unity of oneself with the divine.

This remains elusive and highly subjective language of course. Like I said though, it’s important to “get in the door”, meaning, start with a simple class, or if you already know some yoga, just do some. Ten or fifteen minutes a day even and you’ll notice a big change in a short period of time.

The practice has a sneaky way of making you feel happy and mentally calm even if you just set out to do it to just get in shape. Along with encouraging a sense of well-being, yoga has been scientifically proven to aid in balancing weight, increasing strength and flexibility, and can be used to effectively treat or normalize a whole plethora of disease, including; substance abuse, emphysema, heart disease, eating disorders, depression, arthritis, asthma, back pain, cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, diabetes, migraines, high blood pressure, infertility, insomnia, excess weight and much more.

Because we wake up each day in a body with an expiration date, sitting still only speeds up the entropy that is already going on. But by doing more breathing, stretching, and strength building, it’s likely we can avoid a lot of the malaise and hospital visits you see around you.I do a physical yoga practice each morning which gives me energy, a pain-free body, and has probably saved me lots of money in doctors’ bills.  Although yoga for me is a lot about the way I live, as much time as I spend writing about yoga or with a book in my face, simply getting to the practice each morning is one of the best things I can do for myself. As one of my teachers likes to say, “crawl on your mat if you need to!” You can listen to a yoga podcast interview between Adrian Cox and Paddy McGrath.

Another benefit of the practice is that it requires next to nothing in terms of equipment. Your body and determination is really all that is required. As the owner of a yoga studio, by proxy I own hundreds of yoga mats, but me personally, I don’t own a single one. It’s me, my breath, and the floor. Once you learn some of the basics of yoga, you too can continue to practice by yourself at your own schedule. A short 15-20 minutes a day, 6 days a week and in a week or two, you’ll feel better than you have in years.

I hear “oh, I’m not flexible enough!” a lot when I talk about yoga. That however is precisely WHY people should do yoga. Among the numerous benefits which span from physical, energetic, mental, and spiritual, doing yoga is the solution for stiff people. Give it a try, with regular practice, it can indeed treat what ails you, while encouraging a whole new positive perspective on life.

Shane and I are leaving Bangkok this month to teach in Switzerland and yoga workshops in Prague over my birthday on April 11. Yoga Elements Bangkok has Anusara-inspired yoga workshops with Sarah Avant Stover (March 21-23) and more Anusara yoga with certified teacher; Kristoffer Nelson (April 25-27) as well as a beginner and intermediate Ashtanga Vinyasa yoga intensive at Yoga Elements Studio Bangkok with Clayton Horton- who is a well known and respected Ashtanga teacher from San Francisco.

Lately I’ve been studying the idea of Marmas, the yoga equivalent of pressure points. In total there are said to be 107 of these points on the body from head to toe. The original idea of these comes out of the Indian martial arts system, (called Kalarippayatt) which is classically also a system of Vedic knowledge just like yoga. It comes from a broader field of all things martial and administrative (how to rule a fair kingdom) called the “DhanurVeda”. Thais will recognize the word “Dhanur” which is the same word that goes to make up the word TANWA-KOM (month of December). For those not literate in Thai or Sanskrit, TANWA comes from TANU which is the Pali version of the Sanskrit word for BOW. Like an archers bow. If you know much about Astrology, December is the month of Sagitarius, whose icon is the half man/half horse, called a Centaur and it’s holding a bow, shooting an arrow.

 I love these correspondences, and it’s one reason I love living and teaching yoga in Thailand so much!

The ancient martial artists would memorize these marma points so that when in battle, it would be possible to hit or strike a certain point and cause instant or gradual death. On the flip side, it’s then good practice to strengthen one’s own marma points so in case you meet someone who’s aggressive and knowledgeable  you’re covered.

That’s where there is this interface between martial arts and yoga asana believe it or not.

There are two systems of martial arts in Southern India and they use yoga postures as part of their training.

I just wrote another blog piece about marmas, about how to place Sanskrit mantras at these marma points to create a kind of psychic and energetic armor to ward away trouble.

Yoga also just feels so GOOD, regardless of whether you know what marmas it’s strengthening or not.

Speaking of which, I just have to make a little plug to announce that my favorite asana teacher Paddy McGrath is coming for yoga workshops at Elements yoga studio in Bangkok, Thailand. This woman has taught me more about posture than anyone…  if you’re around we will have weekday and weekend workshops from March 3rd to March 9th. I’ll be there, say hello and let me know you read this!

Today I ran into a student (I’ll call him Marcos) in the produce section of Tops Central Chidlom (a supermarket here in Bangkok). I was surprised to see him walking around, conscious and clear. Marcos still has 9 stitches in his head, and had to be woken up every two hours, so he wouldn’t slip into a coma. That’s what you do when you have a concussion. I remember, I had one in a skiing accident many years ago.

While he was filling me in on the experience in the hospital his wife called to make sure he was all right walking around by himself.  After all, it was only a day before she had to escort him out of my 2 hour pranayama class and to the hospital, making sure the blood soaked towel wrapped around his head didn’t fall off.

How could a yoga class cause a tall man to pass-out, fall backwards, hit his head on the floor and end up in the hospital with a concussion? We’re not even talking about a hard-core physical session either… it’s a class entirely about BREATHING!