Razzle Dazzle, Love And Other Useful Alignments: Teaching Gentle Yoga At The Wailea Yoga Shala: Wailea, HI: January 21, 2018

Maui inspires the razzle dazzle in me. Mahalo.

There are many definitions of yoga and today we worked with PYS 1.2 Yoga Chitta Vrittis Nirodahah using the translation, yoga is the quieting of the mind. All winter we've leaned into quieter practices for the purpose, as it says in PYS 1.3, for experiencing a deeper Truth. Why so much emphasis on quiet minds resting in deeper Truths? So we can loosen the grip on identifying the tight spots (PYS 1.4).

We ventured deeper into the Kleshas today to begin to help understand Asmita using Ravi Ravindra's definition of "attachment to the small". Through the practice as tight spots revealed themselves, the house suggestion was to meet it with Love using MLK's wisdom "Darkness can't drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate can't drive out hate, only Love can do that". We also leaned into Mary Oliver's suggestion in The Ponds of being willing to be dazzled, to cast aside the weight of facts" to help us. 

Since the practices of yoga are here to help us break habitual patterns, and since we can't transmit what we can't see, I too went out on a limb, stretched out of my small self and taught crow pose and malasana as a way to turn our willingness over to the path of the heart (balance on hands and lifting the feet). 

Windshield wiper

Eye of the Needle

Hamstring stretch with strap

Rest

Cat and cow

Plank

Downdog

Uttanasana

Tadasana

Easy lunge salutes with Razzle Dazzle

Lizard/ gecko dance

Malasana

Tadasana

Heart tapping

Lunge

Hammock

Warrior II dance facing the ocean

Warrior II dance facing the mountains

Malasana

Crow

Butterfly

Green Tara side stretch

Savasana

Sit

Namaste

Mary Oliver's Poem "The Ponds" inspired this class

Every year
the lilies
are so perfect
I can hardly believe

their lapped light crowding
the black,
mid-summer ponds.
Nobody could count all of them —

the muskrats swimming
among the pads and the grasses
can reach out
their muscular arms and touch

only so many, they are that
rife and wild.
But what in this world
is perfect?

I bend closer and see
how this one is clearly lopsided —
and that one wears an orange blight —
and this one is a glossy cheek

half nibbled away —
and that one is a slumped purse
full of its own
unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled —
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing —
that the light is everything — that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.