Wild and Precious: Teaching Flow and Restore at 808 Wellness: Kihei, Maui, HI: January 21, 2019

Oh my goodness its the end of the winter teaching season. Its the beginning of tour season. Its hello and goodbye. Its Aloha.

I haven't been blogging much this winter because I've been writing my book. I've been sacrificing some small loves for bigger plans, and vice versa. Big psychic openings have demanded I let go of smaller thinking. Its been quite a winter, in the words of Mary Oliver, its been "wild and precious", exhilarating moments of great joy, as well as many difficulties. The loss of Lucy my beloved dog, health issues that point an unwavering finger at middle age, and other wounds so freshly broken open I can't even commit them to paper.

We opened in savasana, corpse pose, classically a pose you save till the end of class. But the bigger teaching is that there really isn't such thing as a finish. Life is ongoing. Death implies birth, and birth implies death. Crest implies trough, and tough implies crest. The only real death is letting go of the clinging to the status quo, a habit the yogis call abhinivesha (PYS 2.9), a habit so sticky the sutras say it overwhelms even the wise. Yoga is breaking the bonds of suffering, says the Bhagavad Gita. That’s the death.  Breaking the bonds of small hearts and small minds while the universe plays on (lela).

One of the suggestions on how we might navigate the suffering of the crests and troughs of our wild and precious life is through equanimity (PYS 1.33), and also through being in the presence of our breath (PYS 1.34), which is also, to my delight, one of the translations of Aloha.

The aloha spirit isn't just a great slogan on a tourist t shirt, its real and its alive, and it has saved me this winter so it was the only real choice to share in class today.

Here is our sequence:

Savasana
Pranayama exercise

 Windshield wiper

Supine pada gustasana

Cat and cow
Gate and half-half moon

Downdog

 Uttanasana
Tadasana
YAM

Guitar hero

Lunge
Twist
Warrior II
Peaceful Warrior-Side Angle flow
low lunge
Unicorn

Dancer
King Dancer

windshield wiper
easy twist
The aloha in me sees the aloha in you
Namaste