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JANUARY 5, 2011.   PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR BREATH.  That's it.  This is yoga!  And this yoga can be practiced anytime, without any warm-up, anywhere, with anyone or by yourself.  I know you were probably thinking it would be harder or more complicated?  But nah, Yoga teaches us that when we are not present our minds become totally distracted and our thoughts are all over the place, starting stopping, wandering from one thing to the other at often break neck speed.  If we pay attention we harness the power of our thoughts.  As a human being this is what distinguishes us from other creatures and is our GREATEST STRENGTH.

 Forgetting to pay attention happens to the best of us. 

The Yoga Sutras say “enjoyment is the sweetness of noticing your life right now – smell, taste, feeling, sensation”  You see in times of doubt the key thing to know is that there is a point to it all. Even when we don’t understand why things are happening in our life we can rest assured as Sadie Nardini says, “alongside positive change, challenge appears.” This is why the greater point to spiritual practice is simply to drop in, tune in and PAY ATTENTION.  

 My teacher Shiva Rea says, "All beings have their yoga. This insight comes from a profound contemplation by Abhinavagupta. [He was] a prolific 12th-century scholar. He has this great axiom about yoga which is “tuning ourselves into our essential vibration.” We are learning how to tune ourselves into being present.  This is why we go a yoga class. We feel out of tune. We start to feel in tune after the practice. I think only human beings distort ourselves to be something that we already are, our essential selves. For instance, a tiger essentially knows its nature; where as human beings have this incredible capacity to forget who we are and then have to search for ourselves."

 I know from my own practice that the most powerful thing we can do is just be present to whatever is happening, tune in and trust that ability to focus one's thoughts will be enough to bring the clarity you need for the next moment. And we only live one breath, one moment at a time without needing to change anything. Today practice Anapana-Sati breathing and notice how this impacts the best of your day.  Love yourself, love your day, love your life! Silvia

ANAPANA-SATI BREATHING TECHNIQUE

Watch for the judgmental mind that discounts small movements as insignificant or unimportant
or the ambitious mind that jumps in to tell you to make your breath bigger or deeper,
or labels your perceptions as good or bad in order to arrive at a conclusion.
- Donna Farhi

DEFINITION: Anapana means breathing.  The full name of this technique is anapanasati or mindfulness breathing.

PURPOSE: The primary purpose of this breathing concept is to gather more specific information about one's breathing patterns, rhythm, and intelligence. Simply observing the natural breath, do not breathe in a certain way or make your breath imposing. It is helpful to enter this inquiry with curiosity and inquisitiveness rather than a desire to get it right. This technique will calm your mind and keep you in the present preventing thoughts from stimulating stress. Be watchful. Thoughts will sneak up on you. When you catch yourself drifting toward thoughts, you must bring yourself back to natural breathing.

TECHNIQUE: Lay on your back or sit in any comfortable position, place one hand on the belly and the other on the chest or place both hands on the belly with the fingertips below the navel. After observing the location of the breath, you may move the arms to the side with the palms facing up.

Location of the Breath: Where is the movement of the breath most noticeable? In the lower part of my body or in the upper part?

Origin of the Breath: Where does the movement of the breath begin? Just as an earthquake has an epicenter that scientists can locate, your breath has an epicenter.

Frequency of the Breath: Is your breath fast or slow or somewhere in between? Count the number of breaths per minute or if possible have a friend count them for you. Twelve to fourteen breaths per minute is consdidered a normal rate.

Phrasing of the Breath: Is there a noticeable difference between the length of your inhalation and exhalation? Are they equal?

Texture of the Breath: Is the textyrue of your breath smooth and even or is it jerky and uneven?

Depth of the Breath: Does the breath feel deep or shallow?

Quality of the Breath: If you could describe the quality of your breath what word or words would you use? Is it pneumatic, labored, billowing?...Let descriptive worlds or images arise without latering them in any way. Do you have any images that you associate with your breathing?

Reference: Donni Farhi, The Breathing Book

"I like Anapana because there is no judgment involved. It is refreshing to just feel the breath without trying, or feeling the need to change it. It creates a kind of self acceptance for me. I am where I am." - Shannon Barker

NOVEMBER 11, 2010.   Sit down, DROP IN, TUNE IN, BE PRESENT.  That's it.  This is yoga!  And this yoga can be practiced anytime, without any warm-up, anywhere, with anyone or by yourself.  I know you were probably thinking it would be harder or more complicated?  But nah, Yoga teaches us that when we are not present our minds become totally distracted and our thoughts are all over the place, starting stopping, wandering from one thing to the other at often break neck speed.  If we pay attention we harness the power of our thoughts.  As a human being this is what distinguishes us from other creatures and is our GREATEST STRENGTH.

Forgetting to pay attention happens to the best of us. 

The Yoga Sutras say “enjoyment is the sweetness of noticing your life right now – smell, taste, feeling, sensation”  You see in times of doubt the key thing to know is that there is a point to it all. Even when we don’t understand why things are happening in our life we can rest assured as Sadie Nardini says, “alongside positive change, challenge appears.” This is why the greater point to spiritual practice is simply to drop in, tune in and PAY ATTENTION.  

My teacher Shiva Rea says, "All beings have their yoga. This insight comes from a profound contemplation by Abhinavagupta. [He was] a prolific 12th-century scholar. He has this great axiom about yoga which is “tuning ourselves into our essential vibration.” We are learning how to tune ourselves into being present.  This is why we go a yoga class. We feel out of tune. We start to feel in tune after the practice. I think only human beings distort ourselves to be something that we already are, our essential selves. For instance, a tiger essentially knows its nature; where as human beings have this incredible capacity to forget who we are and then have to search for ourselves."

Or as one of my favorite quotes reads "When you come to the edge and are about to drop off into the unknown, one of two things will happen:  There will be something solide to stand on or You will be taught to fly."  

I know from my own practice that the most powerful thing we can do is just be present to whatever is happening, tune in and trust that ability to focus one's thoughts will be enough to bring the clarity you need for the next moment. And we only live one breath, one moment at a time.  Love yourself, love your day, love your life! Silvia

PS Join me on a Yoga retreat with Alchemy Tours and without distraction really tune in to what you want for your life!

NOVEMBER 10, 2010.  Jon Kabat Zinn says, "too often our lives cease working because we cease working at life."  

Yoga teaches us that when we are not present our minds become totally distracted and our thoughts are all over the place, starting stopping, wandering from one thing to the other at often break neck speed.  If we pay attention we harness the power of our thoughts.  As a human being this is what distinguishes us from other creatures and is our GREATEST STRENGTH!  Yet our least utilized.  When we start the practice first thing we do is remind everyone to be conscious of their breathing, to pay attention to the breath: anapana sati breathing technique.  Not being bossy just watching it. For as Gabrielle Roth writes in the book Sweat your Prayers, "the breath is promiscuous, and if you don't pay it attention it will find another lover."  

Consider how tuned in to your breath you have to be to experience this from Pieree Teilhard De Chardin “The inhale and the exhale. Breathing out carbon dioxide to the trees and breathing in their fresh exudations. Oxygen kissing each cell awake, atoms dancing in orderly metabolism, interpenetrating. That dance of the air cycle, breathing the universe in and out again, is what you are, is what I am.”  Wow!  All he is talking about is paying attention to the breath. 

 Then by paying attention to the breath the breath reveals your state of mind and heart.  “If you want to know the past, to know what has caused you, look at yourself in the present, for that is the past’s effect. If you want to know your future, then look at yourself in the present, for that is the cause of the future.”  Majihima Nikaya

And as we pay attention to breath, we then pay attention to aligning our movements or poses with the breath.  There is this really on purpose experience of where we put our hands and feet and energy without judgement, just observation.  For what we know and don't know eventually become one.  Rumi says it like this: 

why are you so busy

with this or that or good or bad

pay attention to how things blend

why talk about all 

the known and the unknown

see how unknown merges into the known

All that you know, all that you don't know are no longer things to be feared or apologized for or worried about.  Just by paying attention the universal intelligence that loves and supports us all is working on our behalf.  All we have to do is pay attention and the rest works itself out for our greater happiness.  Love yourself, love your day, love your life! Silvia 

PS And if you need a way to re-establish the ability to pay attention without distraction come on retreat with me. Stretch your mental and physical boundaries! Alchemy tours. Facebook us, facebook me anytime, visit our website www.alchemytours.com or www.silviamordini.com

NOVEMBER  1, 2009:  “If you want to know the past, to know what has caused you, look at yourself in the present, for that is the past’s effect. If you want to know your future, then look at yourself in the present, for that is the ause of the future.”  Majihima Nikaya

What I would love for you to do today is just Pay Attention.  Start by paying attention to your breath.  When’s the last time you really thought about the power of your own breath?  Consider this prose from Pieree Teilhard De Chardin to help inspire you “The inhale and the exhale. Breathing out carbon dioxide to the trees and breathing in their fresh exudations. Oxygen kissing each cell awake, atoms dancing in orderly metabolism, interpenetrating. That dance of the air cycle, breathing the universe in and out again, is what you are, is what I am.”  Wow!  All he is talking about is the breath. 

Keeping the breath in mind helps us to focus our attention. It is an anchor to the present moment and if you use it the breath will always guide you back to yourself when your mind wanders.  The breath helps us remember that we can only live one moment at a time and that is right here, right now so we might as well be alert to whatever is actually happening.  If we stop paying attention to the moment before we know it we stop paying attention to our life and years or decades slip by.  Jon Kabat Zinn says, too often our lives cease working because we cease working at life.

Yoga teaches us that when we are not present our minds become totally distracted and our thoughts are all over the place, starting stopping, wandering from one thing to the other at often break neck speed.  If we pay attention we harness the power of our thoughts.  This is a human being what distinguishes us from other creatures and is our GREATEST STRENGTH.  I don’t care how much money you make or have in the bank, the value of the currency of your thoughts is worth more than anything! 

Probably the coolest thing I come back to time and again is that we get to choose on purpose our own thoughts!  Our thoughts then are like a magnet that attract similar energy (positive attracts positive, negative attracts negative).  So why would we waste time paying attention to negative thoughts over and over again?  Why wouldn’t we choose to pay attention to what makes us stronger.

Ultimately, when we are present and paying attention we can through practice have a meaningful dialogue with ourselves asking “WHO AM I” and as Swami Vivekananda says, “We are responsible for what we are and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves.”  And from there we are so focused that we can ask ourselves “WHY AM I HERE?”  You’ll be amazed that this naturally evolves simply from paying attention.  But if your mind is disturbed its like rough waters on a lake you can throw a pebble in and you won’t be able to see the ripple effect because the water is too choppy…but if your mind is calm from paying attention you can throw a little pebble and watch it ripple.  When you practice yoga, you see these ripples of possibility every moment!

Today just say to yourself “My life is precious and glorious and I will pay attention.”  Love to you, Silvia

OCTOBER 20, 2009:  “You can’t run after contentment it has to find you, all you can do is try to create the space for it. Pay attention to what you can let go of” to create that space. What I think Judith Lasater is talking about as is interpreted by the Yoga Sutras is to drop our heavy expectations. You know those expectations that weigh us down because they are so unrealistic and not even about what we personally want. What is our own truth. 

So you guys we can begin right now paying attention to our own enjoyment or CAPACITY to enjoy life:  The Yoga Sutras say “enjoyment is the sweetness of noticing your life right now – smell, taste, feeling, sensation”  What do you want that is meaningful to you?  Well ok then can you simply put that out there as a gentle intention allowing it to come to you instead of pulling at it. Also can you receive it if when it does find you it doesn’t exactly look like what you expected?

I put out to the universe what I wanted in my life a little over a year ago.  I thought I was ready to receive it no matter what especially since I consider myself pretty open-hearted and open-minded. But then when what I dreamed was finally offered to me I had that initial moment of “hey that’s not exactly as I wanted it because there is too much distance and some aura of complexity involved.” Come on! But the thing is I’ve learned it is exactly in the way I needed to receive it.  The universe totally knew what was best for me and delivered to me the situation that was the healthiest. And I’ve never been happier.  If I had turned my back on what was right in front of me because it didn’t totally match my strict expectations I would have missed out on maybe the best experience of my life.  How sad would that have been?  And how often have you done that?

Equally we learn what letting go of expectations is not:  which Sean Corne says so well, “Well what it isn’t is trying to rewrite the past, we can learn something (even from those that have hurt you or things that didn’t go the way you wanted them to) and move on.”  So today really use the practice to quiet your mind by paying attention to what extremes of your expectations you can let go of.  And most importantly can you try to release your mind from constantly wanting your situation to be different.  There is no reason to make war with what you feel, see or experience.  You have the freedom to open your heart to what you might be missing by relaxing some of the armor like expectations that can form around you

In closing here is one of my favorites quotes from the book Immunity to Change is “Happiness is really freedom from unhappiness.”  So join me in softening our expectations so we can find the:

·         Freedom to be happier than ever before

·         Freedom to try new things

·         Freedom to meet new people

·         Freedom to make happy failures

·         Freedom to not play it all so safe

·         Freedom to do the unexpected

·         Freedom to just see what happens

Love to you all, Silvia

OCTOBER 8^TH, 2009:  Steve Jobs gave this commencement address talking about connecting the dots.  It is a long time favorite.  He gave this address in 2005 if you google it there is more to the speech but this is what I want to share with you today.  On the mat there is a point to everything we do.  It is on purpose.  Robin Sharma says a life of purpose is one lived on purpose.  Yup I keep figuring that out. So the alignment both energetic and physical is with great intent.  It’s not haphazard.  It also works as part of an evolutionary experience or what we might call kramas or waves. That by laying the foundation of a pose we build upon that.  We learn through yoga to educate ourselves about our bodies and minds and each class grows this awareness from the previous class.  Now of course things happen in life that we don’t see or understand why they are happening, like when I lost my dad when he was only 59 years old.  But at some point I had to say ok enough already there must be a greater purpose behind this experience of being fatherless. 

You see in times of doubt the key thing to know is that there is a point to it all.  Even when we don’t understand why things are happening in our life we can rest assured as Sadie Nardini says, “alongside positive change, challenge appears.”  Yes.  So what is the greater point to spiritual practice?  To help us PAY ATTENTION.

“The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”  (Steve Jobs)

APRIL 2 2009:  One of the first things we do to begin class is often take a comfortable seat.  It is on purpose.  There is a point to how we sit so as to improve the ability of the body to breath better.  Then we bring our hands together, palm to palm in prayer. This is known as Sankalpa Mudra or Anjali Mudra.  Mudra means gesture of commitment.  We are doing something with our hands on purpose.  There is a point to Sankalpa Mudra, it is our opportunity to set an intention, a dream, a wish, a vision.  Really when we set our intention it is setting an expectation of ourselves.  There is a point to our practice.  And each time we rejoin our hands we remember to remember the promise we made to ourselves as to how this time for us is meeting our expectations. 

It is like a commitment ceremony at the start of every class.  And every breath will deepen your commitment to your intention on and off the mat.

The key thing to know is that there is a point to it all.  Even when we don’t understand why things are happening in our life we can rest assured as Sadie Nardini says, “alongside positive change, challenge appears.”  Yup.  So what is the greater point to spiritual practice?  To help us PAY ATTENTION.

The Yoga Sutras say “enjoyment is the sweetness of noticing your life right now – smell, taste, feeling, sensation” This is the answer to why pay attention, in that we don’t get to do today over again.  Therefore as a result of your intention you can observe your progress towards the promise you made to yourself. And know you have come a really long way already before you even step on the mat.  So once we realize that the point of the practice is to pay attention, to be present we stop trying to redo the past.  We see we are here and now just all doing our best in appreciating how precious life really is.  So tune in, love your life and trust in the process.  Love to you all! Silvia