Samyama’s Mini-sabbatical

The Patanjali mural at Samyama Yoga Center in Palo Alto

The Patanjali mural at Samyama Yoga Center in Palo Alto

Life is filled with small blessings. When word arrived that we were going to take a ten-day ‘mini-sabbatical’ at Samyama Yoga Center I accepted the news but couldn’t help but ask “Why?” It’s unsettling when the schedules we’ve created for ourselves shift. It feels like a violation of our trust. It feels as if everything is out of our control. But it serves as a reminder that all we have is change. The good news about this particular change is that it will be brief and very soon order will be restored. We should remember, however, that sometimes the change we push against turns out to be exactly what we need.

In Yin I talk about creating space. Our little Samyama Sabbatical is doing exactly that. It’s creating space. It’s offering a few days of self-reflection and a shift in perspective. We can take time to consider our personal yoga practice and how we bring it into the world. We can take time to consider what it means to practice yoga. Is yoga only about showing up at the studio for asana class? What would happen if we used the time Samyama’s sabbatical is giving us to volunteer? To offer something of service to our community?

My regularly scheduled classes at Samyama are cancelled from Friday the 13th of February through Sunday the 22nd.

They will resume on Monday the 23rd of February.

I will, however, be teaching my partnered Yin workshop “Giving and Receiving” on

Saturday the 14th of February from 1:00 to 3:00 pm. There are still a few spaces left.

A Place Called Home

1 Comment

January 19:

CIMG2014I suppose there is always the chance that something catastrophic will happen.  The seller might change her mind.  Or maybe the numbers won’t add up. But those possibilities are, at this point, remote at best.  It looks like escrow really is going to close in seven days.

I’ve never owned a home before and until I signed the first sheet of paper that initiated the home buying process I didn’t know it was something I wanted.  But my signature on that piece of paper delivered a powerful and unexpected wave of energy that was at once euphoric and grounded.  Some might feel that home ownership ties you to an impossible commitment.  I had the opposite reaction.  For the first time, I felt free.

Of course, that sense of autonomous freedom is tempered by the heavy burden of borrowing enough money to purchase a four-bedroom home in Des Moines, Iowa.  But the Below Market Rate program exists so that individuals like me have an opportunity to stay in the overpriced Bay Area.  Even if instead of a four-bedroom home what I’ve found is a perfectly located one-bedroom condo to call my own.

But the burden that follows debt is not the only weight I have to process. As I fill boxes to move and boxes to donate to charity, I am struggling with the weight of accumulation.  I’m asking myself if the gathering and release of too many belongings is indicative of a lost yoga practice.  How do I reconcile my yoga life and my worldly life?  Are the boundaries blurred or hard-edged?  Where do they overlap?  Or are these two lives really the same?

January 23rd:

Last week, I made an unsettling decision.  I set the intention to rid myself of ghosts.  Five years ago my move into this small studio apartment was an act of self-preservation.  Personal difficulties offered no alternative. I brought what little furniture I had and gathered what else I needed from gracious and generous friends.

But the pieces of furniture that I brought with me then now hold ghosts from that past.  I can’t bring those ghosts with me.  It’s time for a new beginning. And so the desk, the book cases, the chair and the fold-up-futon are being sent away to neighbors and strangers who won’t notice the memories tucked into the back of a drawer or molded into the crease of a seat cushion.

But I wonder if the willful release of these very functional pieces of furniture demonstrates a lack of fiscal responsibility and an all-consuming selfishness?  As a yogi should it not be part of my practice to mindfully detach from the troubling memories and emotional scars? What surrounds me is little more than an assemblage of particle board and veneers of inexpensive birch.  How can a desk hold the imprint of trauma? How can wood hold memory?  Yet the very glue that binds these pieces together also binds me tight against the energy of events that unfolded years ago.

January 24th:

It doesn’t matter if you move across an ocean, to another state or down the block.  Moving creates CIMG1757chaos.  It stirs up dust.  Surrounded by the boxes I began to pack when finding home was still only a hope, I’m reminded of the promise I made to myself to live simply.  I ask myself if, after everything that has happened since my return from Ireland, I deserve the happiness I’ve enjoyed over this past year.  The answer is easy.  Yes.  Of course I do.  We all deserve happiness and we all deserve a place to call home.  Even me.

And so, for now, this is my practice.  I will remain in the happiness of the present moment.  I will humbly remain mindful of the truth we call change.  With each breath I will be grateful that I am loved and that, as of January 26th, 2015, I have a place on this astounding planet that I can call my home.

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨

 

 

Shakti What?

IMG_3249I’ve been leading early morning practices at Samyama Yoga Center since the studio opened in April of 2013. And I’ll admit that until this moment I had no idea why our wonderful and fearless leader John Berg chose the name Shakti Reset to describe my one-hour classes. I would have gone with something boring like Slow Flow or Beginning Hatha.

Today my inquisitiveness finally inspired me to find out what all this Shakti business was about. I found this:

Shakti energy restores balance and re-establishes order.

It is energy without beginning or end. Energy that alternates between motion and rest.

It turns out John wasn’t simply being clever. He gave my morning classes the perfect name. Labeling a class Slow Flow or Beginning Hatha is adequate but subjective. How slow is slow? And what part of the pantheon of hatha choices are you beginning with?

Shakti Reset is less a name and more a description. In my morning classes we alternate between the flowing motion of an alignment-focused standing sequence and the stillness of soft restorative shapes. We begin the hour with the clarity of collective silence and end with the unifying intention to carry our practice into the world and to keep our thoughts clear, our words kind and our hearts filled with compassion.

I am so pleased that beginning Friday the 16th of January I’ll be able to offer Shakti Reset three times per week. You can now join me on Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 8:15 to 9:15 AM. The first class at Samyama is always free.

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨

 

 

 

A New Practice

IMG_1824

To say it has been a busy few months is an understatement.

A friend asked the other day, “So, how do you feel now that it’s all over?”  She was referring to the conclusion of two years of study at Sofia University and the success of my final paper (which you can read here), my year-long adventure in yoga-therapy training at Niroga Institute, and the end of Samyama’s first 8-week teacher training program, The Dharma Path, where I had the honor of assisting John Berg in the teaching of asana and methodology.

“Are you excited?  Or is there a void?”

The possibility of there being a void in my life was something I hadn’t considered.  But Hillary’s question encouraged me to step back and assess how it felt to reach the end of this hectic and amazing chapter.  When I did, I realized there is indeed a gaping hole where writing assignments and reading texts and lesson preparations used to reside.  The undercurrent of urgency that roiled through my psyche has mellowed to a gentle ramble.  The fractal-esque symmetry of life’s repeating pattern of work, teach, study, sleep, work, teach, study, sleep has been disrupted.  Like a Jenga tower with one too many blocks pulled form its foundation, I’m teetering toward the unknown.  I’m restless.

And it’s unnerving.

It’s the faith I hold in the order of life that binds my fragile personal yoga practice together.  When my faith is challenged and order is disrupted, my practice is challenged, too.

The charge, however, is not how to keep my practice alive, it’s how to keep it moving forward.

The key, I think, is to accept this shift in my space/time continuum as a gift.  The end of school and the other recent commitments that took constant and attentive energy did not generate a gaping black hole.  Nor did they manifest a void in my life.  If anything, the end of these commitments created an opportunity for me to see my world and my personal practice with a new perspective.  I have a chance to re-tool my practice and to put the pieces of my life together in a new way.

And that’s what I intend to do.  To accept the gift of open space instead of searching for ways to see it filled.  Is it possible that this is what my personal practice was meant to be all along?  That I should allow my arms to open wide and that I should listen – really listen – to the sound of my breath and beating heart echoing in the space of a less busy life?

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨

 

Into the Light

2 Comments
CIMG1862

Into the Woods, Land of Medicine Buddha, Soquel, California

I’m back!

It’s been the longest two years of my life. Yet it flew by and it’s almost over. In January of 2012 I attended my first seven-day Opening Seminar at Sofia University (formerly Institute of Transpersonal Psychology). In a few short weeks I will complete my final requirements and will be set free, the requirements for my master’s degree in hand.

Much of the work at Sofia is experiential – especially in the first year of the program – and it took quite a bit of trust to stay in the program. This was, after all, unlike any master’s program I had read about. How could I be learning if my assignment was to take a two-hour walk in the woods?

And yet, somehow, I was.

The first year charted the course, and without my noticing, refined my thinking. Those first twelve months focused my energy even through my frustration and resistance. It was a struggle and a retreat and not unlike crawling into a spiritual cave.

But this second year? The stone has been rolled away and there’s light. During this second year the curriculum asks us to gather what we’ve discovered during our first year and figure out a way to bring it into the world. This second year asks us to make a commitment. To live, as the cliché goes, by the courage of our convictions.

My final assignment on this two-year journey is to create an e-portfolio. If you go to my Sofia page you’ll be able to view my resume’, mission statement and philosophy. I’m also including some poetry and artwork created over the past twenty-four months. (Since posting this I’ve continued to re-work the presentation of my e-portfolio.  My intention is to blend it seamlessly into the Practically Twisted site rather than holding it as a separate page. To facilitate that I’ll be removing the Sofia page.)

My Transpersonal Integration Paper will be available to read as a separate post pending approval from the Chair of the program. My topic was A Kosha Model for Creating a Yoga Therapy Based Healing Protocol. (Since posting I’ve learned that my paper has indeed been approved!)

So…these two years are nearing an end. I’ve about to complete the masters and I’ve completed the first 500 hours of Niroga Institute’s yoga therapy program. The question is – how will I fill my days?

Is it time to stop collecting pieces of paper? I think so.

I think it’s time to start using what those pieces of paper represent. It’s time.

The Dharma Path

IMG_2063Tonight I’m taking a break from my social media fast to share with you a program that will be starting at Samyama Yoga Center in Midtown, Palo Alto on Tuesday 7 October.

If you feel the calling to become a yoga teacher or if you want to immerse yourself in pure and true yoga study then you’ll want to join us for The Dharma Path. The Dharma Path is an 8-week, 200-hour Yoga Alliance sanctioned course. With the core curriculum being written and taught by John Berg with support from Natalie D’Onofrio, Hillary Easom, Lindsey Armien, Devin Begley, Louis Jackson, Anirudh Shastri, this comprehensive and intensive course will strengthen the relationship you have with your practice whether yours is a teaching path or not. I’ll be there, too, humbled and honored to be assisting John with asana and methodology.

Honestly? The Dharma Path is not for the faint hearted. John has created a teacher-training program filled with compassion, light and humor but one, too, that will challenge and call us to make a clear commitment to ourselves and to our practice.

I’m ready to make that commitment. Are you?

You can find out more by clicking here or by emailing our Program Director at natalie.d@samyamayogacenter.com.

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨

 

Time Out!

1 Comment

IMG_3243Time Out!

Remember when we were too loud in class and our teachers’ made us put our heads down on our desks?

I’m putting my head down on my desk and taking a time out until the New Year. At least that’s my intention. Shutting down Facebook, not thinking about Practically Twisted – the blog I sporadically post on – or the blogs I have in my head with the catchy titles I won’t reveal.

It doesn’t feel as though that long ago when I announced I was headed to graduate school for my master’s in transpersonal psychology. And yet, here I am, looking at the bright light at the end of the tunnel. The school I attend – Palo Alto’s Sofia University (formerly the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology) – is a good school with a self-inflicted tarnished reputation that it is in the process of restoring. Despite the trauma Sofia experienced last year I trust the education I am receiving because so much of it depends on what I choose to put into it. And in this last term before graduation I intend to give it my all.

Meanwhile, my studies with Niroga Institute’s Yoga Therapy Teacher Training program in Oakland continue.

And, of course, I continue to teach my classes at Samyama Yoga Center in Palo Alto: a Viniyoga inspired slow flow on Monday and Wednesday mornings from 8:15 to 9:15 and my Pure Yin classes on Tuesday evening from 7 to 8:15 and Friday afternoon from 1:30 to 2:45.

There are a few class schedule changes, however. For the following two Saturdays I’ll be teaching a hatha flow from 4-5:30 in the afternoon but because I am away at Niroga for one weekend each month I’ve decided that it’s unfair to the students who want consistency in their practice and so I’ll be handing that class over to a new teacher beginning September 6th.

The Tuesday evening Pure Yin class will go on hiatus in October for eight weeks for an exceptionally cool reason. Samyama will begin the Dharma Path, its own Yoga Alliance approved 200-hour teacher training program. I am honored to be teaching Asana and Methodology with the visionary John Berg. This is going to push and pull me in wonderful ways and I am very excited! If you’re interested in a teacher-training program or would like to deepen your practice I encourage you to contact Samyama for more details. If you’ve been to our two Pathways programs then you have some idea the high expectations we set for ourselves at Samyama. We want to take you on a journey unlike any other.

Finally, I’ll be doing some traveling between now and the end of the year. I’m so looking forward to these adventures – my studies, my training, my teaching and my travel. I want to embrace them all with my whole heart.

I hope to see you in person at one of my Samyama classes and, if not, I’ll see you here in a few months.

 

Blue Sky Mornings

CIMG2291I love grey sky mornings. I love blue sky mornings, too, but there’s something about grey mornings – at least during the Bay Area summer – that are especially nice. Wrapping my hands around a mug of coffee feels different on a grey sky morning. It feels comforting and somehow warms me more than it might on those days when the world is shimmering with clear light.

The pace of a grey sky morning is different, too. Life – the same frenetic full life that was bright and busy yesterday – rests easy through dawn and then breathes itself awake. Muted, soft and lazy yet full of hope and holding the promise of a blue sky afternoon.

On some mornings the shift from grey to blue goes by almost unnoticed. On other mornings the sun burns through the thick cloud fast and hot like a torch.

But that’s what change is like, isn’t it? Sometimes it hangs gently around us until we’re ready to notice. And at other times it’s unexpected. It’s speed and ferocity with which it hits is blinding.

The way things change has been on my mind this week. Especially today. We have traveled more than halfway through our journey around the sun and it seems that the first half of this year has been, for me, a constant teaching aboutaccepting change. Not the small moment-by-moment changes that each breath of life brings but the big rock em’ sock em’ changes.

I want to write that some of the changes in my life were exquisite and others filled with grief. But that’s what we do, isn’t it? We love to assign qualities to change: good, bad, sudden, unexpected. But with our need to name change we forget that names offer our mutable circumstances a potency that can direct our emotional state and determine how we look at what simply is and always will be the movement of our lives.

One of my instructors at Niroga Institute, where I’m enrolled in the yoga therapy teacher-training course, spoke of the simplicity of being neutral. Her words have stayed with me.

Change is here. Always. If we don’t notice change in this breath we might in the next or in the breath after that. Change is our one constant. And as it is we may as well sit in the middle of it free of judgment, fear and craving. Neutral. Only in that basic state will we see the purity of change. Only in that basic state will our instincts know if we’re waking a grey sky morning, a blue sky morning or a brand new morning.

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨

 

Embrace Change

I arrived in the Bay Area a few days after Mount St. Helens erupted, in May of 1980. That first summer was a rough one and there were times I thought about returning to Nebraska, where I’d just graduated from Doane College with a degree in art and education. I thought about running back home to Pennsylvania, too, even though I knew there was nothing there for me.

But I didn’t.

Instead, I worked my way from a hostess at The Good Earth in Santa Clara to a teacher’s assistant at Lakewood Elementary School in Sunnyvale. For a time I directed an after-school extended day care program but I left that job when I began work as an artists’ model. That odd job – sitting still while a room full of painters or drawers or sculptors fashioned my likeness with paint or charcoal or clay – introduced me to a new way of being in the world. Until then I’d felt a bit lost and unsure of who I was and who I was meant to be. But my new friends, most of whom were fellow artists and models, had a way of shaking off any expectations the world held. They walked less certain paths in life. Paths littered with stumbling uncertainty and bold adventure.

One new friend, a fellow model, invited me to join her for a Friday morning yoga class at the only yoga studio in town, a little Iyengar studio on Cowper Avenue. That was sometime around 1985. I didn’t know it then but two decades later I would be the one teaching that very same Friday morning class.

But on Friday, June 27th I will teach my last Friday class at California Yoga Center. My class ends at 10:00 AM.

IMG_3300At 10:01 California Yoga Center, after forty incredible years, will close its Palo Alto studio. A team of volunteers will come in to take away the bolsters and the blankets, the blocks and the belts.

When the news first broke four months ago I held my own grief as well as the grief of my students. Change is difficult. Order in a chaotic life – knowing that at Friday’s from 9 to 10 AM I was teaching at CYC – was easy. But now what were we going to do?

I have three more classes to teach at CYC – this next week, a final Yin class on Monday evening at 7:30 and then my last two hatha classes on Tuesday and Friday at 9:00 in the morning. I will miss the studio very much. It is where I began my practice and where I began to consider teaching.

But change is inevitable and the truth is that we will move on.   Some students will find new teachers and new studios. Others will find my new classes.

Beginning the week of June 30th I’ll be teaching all of my community classes at Samyama Yoga Center at 2995 Middlefield Road (next to the Winter Palace) in Midtown, Palo Alto. Here’s my new schedule:

 

Monday 8:15-9:15 AM – Shakti Reset: Slow Flow in the main studio

Tuesday 7:00-8:15 PM – Pure Yin in the main studio

Wednesday 8:15-9:15 AM – Shakti Reset: Slow Flow in the main studio

Friday 1:30-3:15 PM – Pure Yin in the main studio

Saturday 4:00-5:30 PM – Slow Flow in the main studio

 

One of my yin students left a note for me in my sign in notebook. He wrote,

Embrace change.

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨

 

I’d Like to Thank the Academy….

1 Comment

IMG_1802I’m inclined to play it all humble.  To hide my light under a bushel, blushing and mumbling “What?  Little ol’ me?”  But why?  How often am I going to win an award for writing?  Yeah.  You read that right.  I won an award.  For writing!

My essay, Memories are Made of This, was one among several essays presented First Place Awards from the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club.

You can read the essay here.

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨