Living the Question Blog - Paul Reynolds Kauai » Yoga

McYoga…

Paul Reynolds — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 21:42:48 +0000

Okay brother and Sista Yogis and yoginis – in this post we’re going to lay upon you a full length video that you can view at your leisure that concerns itself with the evolution of Hatha Yoga in the west, specifically the U.S. Be sure to note the story we have also published on this blog a bit earlier in the year called Yoga Competition, a humorous fictional tale , but after watching this film not far from the truth!! Are we in a hurry to reach this item called enlightenment?? Are we already there? What is the nature of this item called competition — really!

And while your at it – another interesting take on this subject takes the form of a well intentioned video called Enlighten Up! —worth the while to watch if you do the Netflix thing or purchase on Amazon.

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Jai Ho! Moms!

Paul Reynolds — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 02:41:17 +0000

Just a little photo/graphic acknowledgment of a yogini/moms with our Koloa Ohana practice.
You may remember Kristen Black earlier last year—

Another strong yogini (below); Jody Kjeldsen and her baby girl doing partner yoga with about 6 weeks to go before baby (name to be announced later)does her first asana on the earth plane.
Jody exclaims that her practice is still feeling great and the only the time the baby gets a little squirmy is when “we are in savasana” — go figger….

Motherhood/parenthood – the “REAL” yoga!:o)!!

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Yoga in da Everyday

Paul Reynolds — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 17:30:00 +0000

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A Yogi’s Welcome

Paul Reynolds — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:00:58 +0000

Welcome
Please allow your stories to be left at the door with your shoes.
You may pick them up if you really want them on your way back out.
They are not required to enter here.
Kiss your ego and allow it to be still.
As you achieve your comfortable seated posture and consciously take in your next breath,

Also take in this assurance…

There is no need to achieve anything here…
There is no need to defend anything here…

This is a safe place.
All is one, in breath and life.

All is here—now.
If there is any request of you it is to allow yourself to remain present and as open as you can … to you!
It may be that you open wide to you today.
It may be that you peek through a crack and find a glimpse of you today.
The door opens, as you are ready. No sooner. No later.

And thus we create the connection

The YOGA -

Between

The anxiousness to see
And
The patience needed
To wait for the understanding.

It’s that space between the in-breath and the out-breath.
It may be uncomfortable at times.
Opening to ‘us’ can be so damn uncomfortable.

But it is in this space that we remember and receive.

Listen for it with your heart.
Feel it with your body.
Relish it with your spirit.

- Paul Reynolds

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What If ?

Paul Reynolds — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:34:09 +0000

Reading at Bodhi Tree practice 07/01/09

What if?

What if religion was each other?
If our practice was our life?
If prayer was our words?
What if the Temple was the Earth?
If forests were our church?
If holy water the rivers, lakes and oceans?
What if meditation was our relationships?
If the Teacher was life? If wisdom was self-knowledge?
If Love was the center of our being What if God was oneself, and all?

1998 Ganga White, Santa Barbara
All Rights Reserved Written at The Rainforest Benefit, NYC April 1998

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Baddha Konasana-Bound Angle and Savasana-Corpse Pose

Paul Reynolds — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 04:17:05 +0000

Reading at Waimea 08/18/09

Baddha Konasana

If you could call it perfection
what would it look like?
How would you know it,
feel it,
be it?

Wherever you are now
call it perfection and know

that in this moment
it is really enough.Savasana

CORPSE

Behold, The Dead
teacher of The Dreamer
whose lessons take a
lifetime to learn.

One third of our lives
spent in the night
yet we have trouble
embracing the darkness
in ourselves.

Outside,
sheep sleep under the stars
worms sleep under the earth
mindless of
insomnias &
nightmares.
Inside,
we sleep under
the illusion
of daybreak,
oblivious to
the light.

—Leza Lowitz

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Real Men Do Yoga—

Paul Reynolds — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 16:58:46 +0000

Thanks to Kekaha Barb for finding this article/video on the yoga outreach – check it out!
Real Men Do Yoga—

Jai HO!!

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Yoga Competition?

Paul Reynolds — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 18:37:51 +0000

A Good friend sent this link to an article about the 7th annual Yoga competition in L.A—-
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/19/fashion/19fitness.html?pagewanted=1

Could this all lead to the following??…

Subject: MONK GLOATS OVER YOGA CHAMPIONSHIP
(WORLD NEWS — FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE)

“I am the serenest!”

LHASA, TIBET-- Employing the brash style that first brought him to prominence, Sri Dhananjai Bikram won the fifth annual international Yogi competition yesterday with a world-record point total of 873.6.
“I am the serenest!” Bikram shouted to the estimated crowd of 20,000 yoga fans, vigorously pumping his fists. “No one is serener than Sri Dhananjai Bikram-I am the greatest monk of all time!’

Bikram averaged 1.89 breaths a minute during the two-hour competition, nearly .3 fewer than his nearest competitor, second-place finisher and two-time champion Sri Salil “The Hammer” Gupta.
The heavily favored Gupta was upset after the loss. “I should be able to beat that guy with one lung tied,” Gupta said. “I’m beside myself right now, and I don’t mean trans-bodily.”
Bikram got off to a fast start at the Lhasa meet, which like most major competitions, is a six-event affair, in the first event, he attained total consciousness (TC) in just 2 minutes, 34 seconds, and set the tone for the rest of the meet by repeatedly shouting, “I’m blissful! –You blissful ?! — I’m blissful!” to the other yogis.
Bikram, 33, burst onto the international yoga scene with a gotd-mandala performance at the 1994 Bhutan Invitational. At that competition he premiered his aggressive style, at one point in the flexibility event sticking his middle toes out at the other yogis.
While no prohibition exists against such behavior, according to Yoga League commissioner Swami Prabhupada, such behavior is generally considered “unBuddhalike.”
“I don’t care what the critics say,” Bikram said. “Sri Bikram is just gonna go out there and do Sri Bikram’s own yoga thing.”
Before the Bhutan meet, Bikram had never placed better than fourth. Many said he had forsaken rigorous training for the celebrity status accorded by his Bhutan win, endorsing Nike’s new line of prayer mats and supposedly dating the Hindu goddess Shakti.
But his performance this week will regain for him the number one computer ranking and earn new respect, for him as well as for his coach Mahananda Vasti , the controversial guru some have called Bikram’s “guru.”
“My special training diet for Bikram of one super-charged, carbo-loaded grain of rice per day was essential to his win,” Vasti said.

The defeated Gupta denied that Bikram’s taunting was a factor in his inability to attain TC. “I just wasn’t, myself today,” Gupta commented. “I wasn’t any self today. I was an egoless particle of the universal no-soul.”

Bikram maintained the lead by supporting himself on his index fingers for the entire 15 minutes while touching the back of his skull to his lower spine. The feat was matched by Gupta, who first used the position at the 1990 Tokyo Zen-off.
“That’s my meditative position of spiritual ecstasy, not his,” remarked Gupta. “He stole my thunder.”
Bikram denied the charge, saying, “Gupta’s been talking like that ever since he was a 3rd century Egyptian slave-owner.”
Nevertheless, a strong showing by Gupta in the third event, the shotput, placed him within a Lotus petal of the lead at the competition’s halfway point.

But event number four, the Contemplation of Unanswerable Riddles, known as koans, proved the key to victory for Bikram. The koan had long been thought the weak point of his spiritual arsenal, but his response to today’s riddle – “Show me the face you had before you were born“-was reportedly “extremely illuminative,” according to commissioner Prabhupada. While koan answers are kept secret from the public for fear of exposing the uninitiated multitudes to the terror of universal truth, insiders claim his answer had Prabhupada and the two other judges “highly enlightened.”

With the event victory, Bikram built himself a nearly insurmountable lead, one he sustained through the yak-miIkchurn and breathing events to come away with the upset victory.

(the author of this piece is unknown)

Well —– did you get that this was —a joke! ( maybe??)

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What is relationship in Yoga?

Paul Reynolds — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 19:45:48 +0000

“A paradox of life is that one is fundamentally alone, yet one cannot exist outside of relationship” – author/yogi -Joel Kramer

When It is that time of season as we see the petals of spring start to respond to the ever-present calling of the sun and the ‘urge to merge’ is supposedly strongest; it is appropriate to flex the yogic muscles and take on the complex subject of relationship.

And how is the subject of relationship supposed to fit in a column principally devoted to the subject of Hatha Yoga?? There is very little, if anything that is ever said in the yogic texts about the “yoga of relationship”

If we agree that much of what we are engaging in our hatha practice are the powers of observation then perhaps looking at the structures and characteristics that form around these two ideas can give us a hint of their connectedness.

The physical practice of hatha yoga has constructs called ‘asana’ from which we can explore the relationship with self.
The relationship with ‘the other’ is also a construct, a tool that can also be used for self-discovery.

But as we look closer many similarities do appear.

Inherit in both the dance of hatha yoga and the dance of relationship is the “urge to merge”, mentioned earlier, the desire to feel ‘more complete and whole, the remembering of connection, the remembering of what it is to love and be loved.

Both relationship and hatha yoga practice are mirrors that reflect back to us just how we approach or how we ‘walk’ in life.

We bring into either construct the goals of; feeling better about ourselves, being happier, being passionate about the way we live, more open, more secure, stronger, more flexible and on a deeper level, to learn more of who we are and why we are here.

As we begin our “practices” of relationship or hatha yoga, feelings of excitement, and enthusiasm mix with anxiousness and possibly a little fear. The give and take of these energies is inherent in both. They bring similar questions to the forefront of one’s awareness.

“What do I want from this practice/relationship?”
“Is this safe?”
“What am I feeling?”
“Shall I take a risk and move further into this experience?”
“What will I allow in?”
“ To what am I paying attention?”

The list of questions may grow and diminish and their answers change daily, even moment-to-moment. In a hatha yoga practice the adjustments of the body to postures and breath take on a similar dynamic. And like in any ‘good’ relationship we are met with challenges, “edges” in the hatha yoga vernacular. In hatha yoga they may be of a physical nature, but can appear as emotional and mental ones as well.

In relationship the energy of love can provide these types of edges as well, for love does not always equate roses and romance.
The Sufi mystic Hafiz makes the following observation;

“Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly
And wants to rip to shreds
All your erroneous notions of truth…
…The Beloved sometimes wants
To do us a great favor:
Hold us upside down
And shake all the nonsense out

Indeed, we will experience the depths and the heights of our psycho-physical make-up in both a relationship and a hatha yoga practice.

As the relationship or the hatha yoga practice continues a certain familiarity develops. Doing the same asana again and again or being in relationship for a period of time can bring a sense of security, but at the same time this familiarity can appear boring, limiting or predictable.
Hatha yoga, like a relationship can open us to new and vast vistas. And yet it can be a closed, system as set patterns emerge, requiring imagination and creativity as well as the ability to listen to keep the practice or relationship fresh and vital.

Again from author/yogi Joel Kramer;
”But it (relationship) could be open, like a river, which by its nature allows newness to enter and flow through it. A river has a defined form or pattern, yet what’s contained within its form is constantly changing.”
.
Both hatha and relationship are tools to help us to remember our connectedness not just to “the other” or ‘to self’ but to all of our experience. This can be seen as the outgrowth, the discernible manifestation of the indefinable, limitless energy of Love.

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What is an artist?

Paul Reynolds — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 19:36:59 +0000

Imagine if you will a ‘few’ thousand years ago and a group of yogis are sitting around in a glade near the Holy Ganges talking it up on the shape of the world, and their chakras and the “Why-are-we-here?” and “Who-am –I?” questions that we still explore to this day. They begin to stir from their seated postures. First an arm perhaps, a leg instinctively extends to remove the stiffness of their seated duration.

“Look my fellows what happens when you do this!” remarks Gupta – “look what I did with my leg! And you know I feel more blood flow there, more energy and truly this leg is much more at ease….”

“Oh I did that last week but I added this to it” remarked his friend Salil as he drew in his other leg and reached his arms out to his extended foot to what we now know as the half-seated forward fold; janu-sirsana. And what’s more, much of my endless worrying has seemed to have become more quiet in my head. I can sit for much longer periods of time!”

“Well,” remarks a third companion “rumor has it that just a league down-river, brother Gorankth has been given a whole bunch of these,’asana’ I think he calls them, and he claims that they were passed down to him by the Lord Shiva himself! Imagine! And not only that, he says he now is able to sit in meditation for days on end!“

“The nerve!” countered Gupta! “I’ll wager that he has nothing like what we have discovered here!– in fact I think if we work on this a little more we can create and discover many more “asana” than he did! Grab some of those palm leaves over there and let’s jot this down before we forget.” “Go ahead Salil, do that one again but this time reach your arm around you back, roll your shoulder back and hold onto your right, no left toe… now what do you feel?? Uh- huh… I see… interesting…okay, now let’s try….”

And so it went for days-on-end before our three yogis took their show ‘on the road’.

Please forgive if I have stepped on sacred toes here, maybe it didn’t happen quite this way. Perhaps it was “divine intervention” or a holy gift from one deity or another that brought us the forms we know today and call “hatha yoga”.

But it appears just as in any art form whether it be dance, the visual arts, music, the culinary arts, that the imagination/divine inspiration (I have yet to find a demarcation between the two) is certainly an active “force” behind their developments. Growth in what ever sensual avenue and tool we have available to us a human beings requires it..

The artist, an archetype of the creative soul is a useful icon as we develop in our practice of hatha yoga. Indeed as we develop in our practice of….Life. We are all artists that make use of an unlimited array of “mixed media”. The pigments, in this case, the practice of hatha yoga.

“….. No artist is pleased . There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction…”
Martha Graham

Enjoy your ability to create! Never doubt for a moment that you are not capable. It is our birthright to build on the imagination that set us upon theses paths and prepares the groundwork for inspirations yet to come.

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Living the Question Blog - Paul Reynolds Kauai » Yoga

McYoga…

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