A bit of radiance

Today I started teaching a fresh online session of morning quickie kundalini, and as I was preparing, it hit me that I wanted to share a tiny reading at the beginning of class.

Then I realized… whoa, I haven’t even wanted to pick a reading for so long, much less read it aloud in class, thanks to the darkness of utter disbelief in anything but the material world that has been plaguing me for the last few years. (I wrote about my sudden release from depression related atheism in the previous post.)

This felt like a big deal… yet another layer of change or another layer of becoming myself again.

And when I was explaining this at the beginning of class, the glee with which long term students reacted to my little announcement confirmed my feeling that we’d all been missing this.

If you’ve been in classes with me, you know I select these randomly by letting the book fall open or having someone yell out a page number.

So here’s the one I read this morning. It’s from this book, which is one of my favorites ever.

Radiance Sutra #61

Adorable one,

Sit or lie down, completely immobile,
Beholding the cloudless sky —
Or if there are clouds, the sky beyond.

As vastness envelops you,
The body vanishes,
Thoughts forget to come.
In this moment,
You are the nature of the great sky.

Why I'm not calling it yoga anymore

If you’ve been with me on this journey and/or taken my classes over the last few years to the last 13 years, you know that when I say I’m teaching a yoga class that you just never know what you’ll get. You know that I have a hard time staying still when it comes to what and how I teach.

You know I’m a seeker and a learner and a deep diver and that eventually everything goes into the big compost heap that is my brain and eventually comes out this body via something new in class that makes us all groan or laugh or, most often, both.

You don’t take classes with me because you’re someone who needs things to always be the same or who needs to know what the heck is going to happen from minute to minute.

You take classes with me because you know I’ll keep you safe and I’ll provide a familiar context but that there will always be something different happening to take you deeper into your own experience of your body/mind/heart.

You also probably know that even though I’ve been studying different lineages of and the philosophy of yoga now for about 25 years, I’ve also always had a love/hate relationship with how it’s used and how it’s taught in the West.

There’s so much missing from what most people call “yoga.”

I've thought long and hard about all of this and have been contemplating the idea of appropriation when it comes to yoga for years now.

On top of that, I simply don’t want to be constrained by someone’s ideas of what I’m teaching just because i use the word “yoga” because it’s simpler than other words or trying to explain myself.

Like I said, you know I’ve never taught a straight up yoga class in my life. Even though my classes most likely have had more prana focus and chant than most classes out there, more emphasis on the underlying philosophy than most.

I will not be calling anything I do "yoga," though I will always source my material and much of what I teach is derived from, again, over 25 years of studying many lineages of yoga.

But I respect the spiritual foundation of yoga too much and I also do not want to associate myself with others teaching yoga in a westernized, watered down way.

So from now on, if you’re looking for my wacky take on yoga, look for Peony Method ON THE MAT or Mindful Mobility. Those will be the “non-dance” versions of my work with lots of emphasis on breath, alignment/biomechanics, nervous system regulation, glandular system stimulation, and energy body schtuff.

February Classes are Open for Registration

(If you’ve not read Katy Bowman’s Move Your DNA, I HIGHLY recommend it. I’m reading it for the third time right now.)

REMEMBER that you can attend my streaming classes live or use the videos whenever you want. AND the links for the videos stay available for the entire month. They don’t expire after 48 hours (which is how a lot of streaming classes do this).

FEBRUARY classes start, of course, on Tuesday February 1st, including:

Quickie Yoga: Two 20 minute classes a week that cover all your body’s basic needs in terms of movement nutrients. These are great also for breaking into smaller snack bites for use every day.

Peony Method, two versions: Slow Anatomy — a concrete approach — and Energy Body — a more woo approach. HA. Each are an hour once a week and you can save a bit of cash by taking both.

All the information and registration is here.

December, 3 One Hour "Kundalini" Yoga for Restoration Classes that you can use into January

Peony…

Though we will have live one hour Kundalini yoga for 3 Sundays (and you don’t have to be live; you can just use video), starting this Sunday, December 5th, the videos will remain available to you for the remaining 2 weeks of December and into January to use as much as you want/need.

Please note: The next session of one hour yoga will not start until mid to late January.

This session will be focused on my mix of ALL THE THINGS yoga to restore you after this hellish year. (Or was this year actually 20 years? I can’t tell…)

You’ll still recognize the basics of a good kundalini yoga class but we’ll be doing other things to help reset your nervous system. For example, we’ll practice a special sensory-deprivation breath with savasana.

There will be lots of goodies to help you feel more grounded and stable and READY for a new and DIFFERENT year (oh, please, make it a different sort of year!!!).

DETAILS:

DATES: Sundays, December 5, 12, 19
TIME for LIVE: 5:30 PM (Eastern United States) to 6:30 PM (and I get online at about 5:20 if you wanna chat)
COST: $50 (for 3 classes that you can use over and over into January)
*As always, if the cost is a stretch, just message me and we’ll figure it out. Please don’t miss out for that reason.

Landing in Your Body and Not Separating Your Self into Parts

I love this quote not because of its accuracy but because it makes us think about how much we separate all of our parts -- physical, spiritual, emotional, psychological, and intellectual.

And when we separate, we create instant cultural based hierarchies of those parts with bodies and emotions usually thought of as less than and intellect and spirit/soul as "higher."

Nope.

NOPE.

It's all one. We're all one. There's no transcending any of our parts or any of our experiences. There's just being brave enough to be IN. IT. ALL.

When we dance or practice physical methods, we might for an instant think we've gone "above" or "out of," but what's really happened is we've finally landed.

If you want to explore all of this more directly, registration is open for December Quickie Yoga and Peony Method classes.

I’m extra excited about the Tuesday class (or whenever you want to use the recording):

Fundamentals of Narrative Based Movement Art to Rewire the Brain for Joy

We’ll be exploring how to strengthen the positive connections in your brain via happy memories. We’ll use guided meditations, sensory awareness, and focused breath to bring the memory fully into the body and then practice different movement prompts to solidify the positive sensory information and corresponding memory stories.

If you’ve never taken a class with me before, THIS will be a great place to start.

To register for this or yoga or the Thursday FASCIA FOCUSED class, go here.

Calming your nervous system, diving into basics, and exploring connection

NOVEMBER CLASSES start next week of course:

For November QUICKIE Yoga, we'll be focusing on the parasympathetic nervous system so lots of breath work, including new practices, and lots of work with the vagus nerve.

For November PEONY METHOD, Tuesdays (and I'm excited about this) we'll be deep diving into all the basics. Whether you've been with me a long time or are new, beginner mind is such a fruitful space to inhabit!

Thursday PEONY METHOD will remain focused on the fascia. There's just so much to do with that material... we've barely begun!

REGISTRATION and more details here.

SURPRISE! Sunday night Kundalini Yoga for six weeks starting October 17th!

I know… it’s been a while since we’ve done the Sunday evening thing. I taught Sunday nights for so very long and the break has felt good but we need this longer, one hour practice.

I’ll be offering a six week session of this every couple of months. I won’t be running these one after the other like I do other classes. Just a heads up!

HOW?

As always, you can participate live or watch the video on your own or do both, because the videos stay available for the whole session.

I’ll stream out of Zoom.

You’ll get the recordings in a private Facebook group.

Music will be provided via a Spotify list and a YouTube list. You’re in charge of using it for yourself or you can do this class in silence, of course.

DETAILS:

DATES: Sundays, October 17, 24 (skipping Halloween), and November 7, 14, 21, 28
TIME for LIVE: 5:30 PM (Eastern United States) to 6:30 PM (and I get online at about 5:20 if you wanna chat)
COST: $85 (for six classes that you can use over and over during the six week period)
*As always, if the cost is a stretch, just message me and we’ll figure it out. Please don’t miss out for that reason.

WHAT?

If you’ve never done my Kundalini classes, go here for more details about my approach.

For this session, we’ll be going back to basics. Which is pretty much what we always do in Kundalini but we’ll be re/membering this practice form the ground up.

The Power of the Gayatri Mantra

I don’t remember when I first came across the Gayatri Mantra, but it was at least over 10 years ago. And there was a time, when I would turn on a version of this and listen to it on looping for a huge chunk of my day. I could feel it repairing some part of my mind/heart without even understanding, at the time, what it was about or how mantra worked in general.

The Gayatri Mantra comes out of the Vedic tradition and is probably from around 1500 BCE (Before the Common Era, for those in the world who are not Christian and therefore would not say BC).

It’s also mentioned in my favorite text, the Bhagavad Gita (link is to my favorite translation/commentary), as the “poem of the divine.”

In Hinduism, it’s said that chanting it or even just listening to it brings happiness and light.

I’m sharing a version from Deva Premal because I love her and find her easy to chant with. This video has it looped a few times to make it longer. But just go on YouTube and start searching for the one that really speaks to you.

The Gayatri Mantra in Sanskrit:

Om bhur bhuvah svah

tat savitur varenyam

bhargo devasya dhimahi

dhiyo yo nah prachodayat.

The Gayatri Mantra Translated:

The eternal, earth, air, heaven
That glory, that resplendence of the sun
May we contemplate the brilliance of that light
May the sun inspire our minds.

*Translation by Douglas Brooks

As is usual with Sanskrit, there are so many translations. Sanskrit is a deeply poetic language and is difficult to translate into English.

Here are some more translations. I believe spending time contemplating these can open new spaces in our mind/heart. Try them out, especially, first thing in the morning, when it’s said to be the most auspicious time to work with this particular chant.

"O thou existence Absolute,
Creator of the three dimensions,
we contemplate upon thy divine light.
May He stimulate our intellect and
bestow upon us true knowledge."

Or

"O Divine mother, our hearts are filled with darkness.
Please make this darkness distant from us and
promote illumination within us."

And one more:

"We contemplate the glory of the light
that illuminates the three worlds:
dense, subtle and causal.
I am that life-giving power, love,
radiant enlightenment, and the divine grace
of universal intelligence.
We pray for that divine light to illuminate our minds."