This past month I have been teaching and exploring the endocrine system.  One thing I appreciate very much is that each system highlights a completely different quality of my being.  I observe differences in my movement and breath options, as well as my state of mind.  I can see these differences reflected in my student’s bodies from week to week as we dive into various systems.   

Sometimes a particular part of the body needs or wants attention, and that was very true for me as I explored my kidneys and adrenal glands this past week.   

I was feeling really tired and could feel the weight of inertia sinking in.  So, I filled up a water balloon with warm water and started to hold it and live with this warm, weighted, cozy, and highly responsive object close to my body.  I walked around the house with the warm balloon held in my hands  or tucked in my shirt or pants when I needed my hands, just kept it near me as I went about my morning.  And, surprisingly, the balloon did not create a stronger sense of weight and inertia in my body which is why I was drawn to it in the first place, but it began to nourish me with the opposite quality.  My body began to feel light, buoyant and resilient.  I began to feel the conversation with the downward pull of gravity and the upward force of levity.   I became a conduit between heaven and earth, and my tissues began to feel their own sense of choice and agency.  Now, this response doesn’t always happen to me which was why I was surprised by the effect.  Often, the balloon helps me remember to slow down, rest and yield more deeply, which I also need to remember. This past week, I could feel my kidneys and adrenal glands, that sit like a cap on top of the kidneys, being this wonderful gateway between the flow of energy moving up and down through my body, as opposed to a place that often holds or is congested.  

You never know what you will feel until you start inquiring.

If you have ever wondered what your kidneys might want to teach you, keep reading on and let’s explore a little further.  

Take a moment and place your attention on your kidneys…

Here is a brief description of where the paired organs of your kidneys generally live in the body.  About the size of a large fist, 4-5 inches, shaped like a bean, the right kidney is a little higher than the left kidney because of the fatty liver taking up more space on the right.  They live on either side of the spine, in front of the 11^thand 12^thribs in the back of the body (the last two ribs at the bottom of your rib cage), and behind the level of the pancreas, stomach, and liver intersection in the front.    

Sit comfortably on a chair or on the floor. Take your hands and rub them together until you have created some warmth and sensitivity in the skin and cells of your hands.  

Place your hands on the back of your body, about the level of the 11^thand 12^thrib, and just let your hands meet the skin over your kidneys.  Begin to breathe into your hands, into your kidneys and also begin to breathe from your kidneys.  How do your kidneys respond to this recognition of their existence?  

Give a thoughtful jiggle to the place in which you are touching as if you are jiggling a water balloon gently.  Do your kidneys want to move?  Organs can slide, glide, give weight, roll and pour, and so much more.  

Try sliding one kidney up while the other glides down, initiating this movement from the kidneys, allowing subsequent subtle shifting of the spine and ribs according to the desire of the kidneys.  Try moving one kidney forward and the other back, so a different rotation in your spine is being initiated by your kidneys.  Is there any other movement that your kidneys want to express or explore?  What movement in your body wants to be initiated when the movement stems from this attention to your kidneys? 

To further awaken this relationship to your kidneys, try humming or sounding from and into your kidneys.  Is there anything else your kidneys want to express to you or reveal to you?  Follow the impulses that arise as you tap into your kidneys.  

And, then release your hands and sit quietly for a moment.  What do you notice?  Can you still feel the warmth and impression of your hands on your back?  What is the quality of your mind?   Any change in your breath or awareness after spending a little time with your kidneys and adrenal caps?  

I am continuously intrigued and inspired by moving from different systems in my body.  It is endless play.  Body Mind Centering® is, among other things, an approach to moving, connecting, sensing and feeling the body from all of the various systems of the body.  The approach is in many ways simple, and sometimes the effect of attending to our body can be rather quick and, yet, at other times it can feel complex and inaccessible.  I highly recommend being patient with yourself; slow down and take the time to notice what happens when you attend to your body differently.  It is the time you take to listen and feel that changes your relationship to yourself and the world around you.  It is well worth the time.  

For years, I practiced a style of yoga that valued alignment.  I often remember hearing that where I placed my body parts mattered and that aligning my body in a specific way was an essential goal of the asana practice.  I was drawn to this approach of the asana practice because I thought that if I aligned my parts in a specific way, I would get it right, master the pose, and achieve something great through my dedication to proper alignment. 

I have no idea if I ever did get it right, and I am not worried about this because something else happened along the way; I discovered that alignment is not an end point, but rather a process.  The practice became a process of inquiry.  

I moved away from caring whether my parts were in the right position and more interested in how my parts were relating to each other in any given moment.  I became interested in how my experience aligned with various relationships in my body. 

Alignment implies relationship, it is about relative position.  Now when I practice, I play with relationships, I explore the never-ending variety and endless possibilities of how I experience alignment/relationship in my body.  For me, the thing that I now work to align myself with is my capacity for responsiveness and adaptability.  And, in doing so, any relative position of my body parts is a source for discovery and creativity.   

When we don’t have a strong and deep relationship to ourselves, to our body, we look outside of ourselves for what is right and true and good, in terms of alignment or wellness or truly anything else.  And, I have found it absolutely necessary to seek out the guidance from informed and skillful teachers who have helped me harvest a deep connection and relationship with my own body.  

A teacher allows space for the student to begin to trust their own experience and hear their own voice, better and better over time.  This teacher/student relationship grows from the same spirit as the developmental relationship with self, full of inquiry rather than finality.  

Through the practice of trust, inquiry, exploration and play, we learn to find the alignment, with our teachers, with our self or with the parts of the body, that is helpful and useful in the moment.  An assertion about alignment needs to be a starting point rather than an end point.  The practice helps bring us back to ourselves, over and over, so that we learn to trust our own natural intelligence and discover what relationships are most valuable to remember.  

I always say, “yoga is an on going process and a forever practice.”  May you find the relationships that help you sense yourself and feel connected and organized in your own body, as well as with the people in your life and the world around you.

The following post is a continuation from last month’s post. If you would like to read Part 1 before you continue onward, please scroll down to Part 1 first.

These ideas are a series of thoughts that I have cultivated from my daily embodied yoga practice. These thoughts, some rather evident and some more obscure, have woven themselves into the fabric of my being and I continually call upon these pillars, these anchors, for humility, grace, support, and guidance.  Perhaps these principles can help all of us see ourselves and each other more clearly.

Take care of yourself

Always find ways to take care of yourself.  Even in the midst of chaos, a pandemic, or a broken heart, during moments of uncertainty or sadness, find ways to take care of yourself.  Hold yourself tenderly and honestly, and listen to the needs of your body; when you need to rest, rest, and when you need to move, move.  When you take the time to harvest an embodied relationship with yourself, when you take time to be still and listen, you will better know what you need to do, when you need to do it, even in the midst of difficult situations. 

New experiences will bring forth new awareness.  Try new ways of moving. 

My practice reminds me daily that change is happening all of the time.  Change is always happening in my body, my environment and in the world around me.  I try to move differently everyday so that my capacity for more options grows.  I am not limited by the previous days experiences, I do not hold on to what was felt or perceived or sensed yesterday, but rather allow myself in every moment to discover, learn, notice, perceive with fresh eyes. It is not that yesterday’s experience doesn’t matter; yesterday’s experience helps build my capacity for discovering, learning noticing perceiving more today.  In my practice, the more of me I perceive, the more of me can be called upon for whatever is needed in the moment.  Similarly, in life, the more I perceive outside of myself with curiosity and openness, the more I am able to connect and feel the always unique texture between me and others.

Trust the earth & yield

Mother earth is vast and forgiving, and can support and hold everything that you are.  When you practice yielding into the support of the ground, when you actively meet and feel the effect of gravity pulling your cells toward the center of the earth, all of your held compensations and patterns begin to change.  The compensatory patterns soften and become more permeable so that you may engage with the world differently and feel your self differently.  When I practice trusting the ground beneath me, my body receives the support it needs.  This support allows me to shift my perception of the world around me and myself.   When I practice yielding I also begin to feel what is me and what is not me, where I begin and where I end.  In turn, I can better support others without losing myself and listen to others without becoming defensive or disappearing. We are all a work in progress; let the earth support you in this process!

I am in process; we are in process.

Our bodies are different every day.  The practice will be different every day.  We are constantly evolving and so is our understanding.  If we never arrive at an end point in this regard, we need to be compassionate in allowing our selves and each other time and space to find better.   This recognition of myself in constant change, as well as allowing my practice to be a metaphor of that change, helps me to be accepting of myself as I continue to learn more along the way.  Of course, I also make more mistakes along the way, and we all make mistakes as part of the process of change and development.  So, each day, we try to ride the waves of change in the direction of feeling better in our bodies, but also making better choices in general.

In the next two blog posts, I will express a series of ideas that I have cultivated from my daily embodied yoga practice. These thoughts, some rather evident and some more obscure, have woven themselves into the fabric of my being and I continually call upon these pillars, these anchors, for humility, grace, support, and guidance.  Perhaps these principles can help all of us see ourselves and each other more clearly.

The intention to pay attention brings clarity.

When I remember to pay attention to a specific relationship in my body, eventually that focused attention in a particular area brings clarity and I get better at finding that relationship.  For instance, paying attention to my pelvic halves relating to my legs and feet; through focused attention, I develop a more keen sense of this relationship.  The familiar sensation or perception of what I once experienced, gradually shifts over time, bringing forth a freshness, an unfamiliar perception in an area of body. The intention to attend to, listen, feel, stay awake and let my body move without getting in the way of its’ wisdom, as best I can, continually brings forth a deeper and clearer understanding of myself.   There is always another facet to learn about yourself.

Get curious about the relationships in your life.

Every day, I open my tissues and my skin, I move my muscles and bones, I roll through my organs, in order to awaken to the continuity and presence of me.  More of me becomes available to feel, respond, move, breathe and enter into a rich conversation, full of various relationships and pathways.  These rich relationships and conversations with myself, allows me to be present and open to having rich relationships and conversations with others.  The more I listen, see and feel in myself, the more I am able to see and empathize with others.  Opening to the beauty of myself helps me remember to open my eyes to see the amazing beauty in others.   This internal embodied practice does not bring me so far into myself that I can see only me, it brings me so far into myself so that I can expand out and be available to hold and support others with compassion and understanding to the best of my ability. 

Difficult is okay.

Difficult moments arise often in life, and this fact remains true in one’s practice on the mat.  When I practice, I work to meet the difficulty with patience and acceptance, and I continue to hold myself with understanding and support as I move through the challenging experience.  The more I go through this process, the more I trust that I can get through a moment even if it is difficult.  I learn to be with the difficult or uncomfortable experience. The difficult or the uncomfortable will change, and knowing that reminds me, again and again, that I can grow more capacity for feeling, for difficulty and for challenging moments.      

Respond vs React .

The more I practice from an embodied perspective of yoga, the more I become conscious of how it is I am responding in any moment.  Practicing this way develops self awareness and trust in the intelligence of my body.  When I trust my body, and as I become more self aware, I am more able to feel where I might be hiding, harming or serving… where I might be over reacting, over doing or not doing enough.  As I spend time feeling, sensing and perceiving, this gives me the support and trust to adapt and respond to the moment in front of me.  To react is to shut down, or to act quickly or impulsively without reflection or awareness.  We need to practice in a way that makes pausing, feeling and reflecting our default mode…  we need to make space to be responsive, to be curious, to step back and see how else we might approach a given situation.

Wisdom really does stem from experience.  Recently, I took an Iyengar Yoga class online with over 100 other students from all over the world.  The class was taught by Genny Kapuler, a New York based teacher who I took classes with, religiously, for five years when I lived in NYC.  It has been more than 15 years since I had last studied with Genny in her Soho Loft.  Genny had stayed with us in Dallas when she came to teach at the Dallas Yoga Center 10 years ago, so our relationship has continued over the years, but this was the first time I had heard her teaching voice in 10 years. 

I received many things from being with her recently, but what I experienced so clearly and very loudly is the notion that the layers of meaning in the words of a great teacher are only accessible in stages that are necessarily tied to our own experience.  In other words, we can only hear what we are ready for and, therefore, there is always so much that will only be revealed in time, after many years of coming back to our practice consistently and over time.  One can hear this very same idea in the ancient yogic texts and I knew it to be true, but practicing with the primary teacher from my formative years, after many years of not practicing with her, allowed me to feel just how true it is. 

Returning to a class with Genny was so familiar and, yet, I experienced myself so differently and I heard her words so differently because I have changed.   All of the anatomical structures and the words we use to describe movement don’t register fully until our experience catches us up to the words and ideas.  My experience of coming back, again and again, to myself and my practice of movement and locating, feeling, finding myself through this practice allows me to hear Genny’s words so differently, and perhaps more fully than ever before.  

I have been saying this statement a lot lately, “You hear what you are ready to learn.”

I don’t think Genny is saying anything profoundly different than she would have said years ago, even though she has certainly evolved in her own ways, but I hear and understand her differently. 

Fifteen or twenty years ago, when I took classes with Genny, I was preoccupied with all things related to the exterior form.  After every weekly class, I would diligently write her sequence down.  I was completely focused upon the form and trying to understand why she sequenced the poses the way she did and why she chose the variations of the postures as she did.  At the time, her poetic words and other deeper and more complex ideas of relating to the body just washed over me.  As must be the case! 

I know at the time that her words were seeping in somewhere, somehow, and sometimes landing in some semblance of understanding, but most of the time they really did wash over me like waves because her words did not mean something to me… yet.  Her words flowed through me and I remember thinking I will never understand why she says what she says.  

After more than a decade, when recently practicing with Genny, I wasn’t preoccupied with the shapes and sequences; I was listening and hearing and remembering the shapes as they unfolded from the inside out.  And I found that Genny’s teaching had so many additional layers and so much nuance, and I could meet her teaching from a point of view that incorporated many years of steady practice, research, experience, change and evolution. 

As I continue to practice with Genny (thank you coronavirus for bringing Genny’s teaching online!), I can see so clearly where I have been and where I am now.  I can truly feel how this practice effects me from the outside to the inside… and then what becomes known on the inside effects the outside again… and back and forth, forever more, just like a mobius strip. 

I like to think about the fact that it takes ten years for some wild flowers to germinate.  This reminds me that trusting and being patient with the process of our practice is so very important.  Good things take time.  Many things can only come into existence over time.  And this is not only okay, but one of the beautiful rewards of working at something for many years.  Like a wildflower, we must let all things germinate fully in their own time. 

Experience really does grow wisdom.