momma langur
looks like she’s saying,
“lean into your hammy!”
Mother Monkey Yoga [Haiku]
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Tag Archives: Yoga
BOOK REVIEW: unMind: A Graphic Guide to Self-Realization by Siddharth Tripathi
unMind: A Graphic Guide to Self-Realization by Siddharth TripathiMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
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This clear and concise guide uses graphics and story to make the self-realization teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi (and those influenced by him) approachable and even entertaining. Ramana Maharshi was a Jnana yogi who advocated a single-minded path of self-inquiry as a means of coming to grips with one’s life. This book does a spectacular job of conveying the method of self-realization and exploring the philosophical ideas that inform it.
For those unfamiliar with Jnana Yoga, there can be said to be three forms of yoga. Bhakti Yoga is the devotional form practiced by those who have an affinity for worship. Karma Yoga is associated with actions and a selfless works. This leaves Jnana Yoga, which is the studious branch of Yoga. Jnana yoga is widely considered to be the most difficult path because it requires constant self-investigation, and because one is working without a net in that one takes nothing on faith, but rather one must see for oneself. This makes Jnana Yoga the least appealing “flavor” of yoga, but if one is a scientifically-minded and studious person, it offers an option that one will find far preferable. While terms like “self-inquiry” and “self-realization” may sound pretty pie-in-the-sky, the approach is really quite grounded.
I found both the text explanations and the artwork to be incredibly effective in explaining the ideas behind self-inquiry and Jnana Yoga. The artwork combines comic strip style graphics with full-page stylized images. Not all the material features graphics, but the text-only pages are concise and easy to follow.
If you are looking for insight into Jnana Yoga, self-inquiry, self-realization, or just the way the mind works, generally, I’d highly recommend this book.
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BOOK REVIEW: Yoga Anatomy, 3rd Ed. by Leslie Kaminoff and Amy Matthews
Yoga Anatomy by Leslie KaminoffMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
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This book has several competitors, and so this review will focus on a few of the features that I believe make it one of the best books on yoga anatomy, and the most appropriate for many users. To clarify, H. David Coulter’s “Anatomy of Hatha Yoga” has some advantages over this book, but Coulter’s book is also denser and will send neophyte readers to the glossary / internet / library much more often. On the other hand, some of the other yoga anatomy books fixate entirely on postural yoga and treat it entirely as a matter of skeletal alignment and muscular engagement. While a lot of this book (and any such book, really) focuses on skeletal alignment and muscular engagement, I appreciated the books exploration of breath and the nervous system – topics that are often neglected. In short, this book offers a mix of reader-friendliness and detail that makes it at once approachable and tremendously informative.
One important feature of this book is that it avoids the dogmatism of some yoga texts, encouraging experimentation and recognizing that a one-size-fits-all approach to bodies is bound to fail. This can best be seen in the “Cueing Callout” boxes that explore the pithy adjustment directives for which yoga teachers are famous (and often satirized,) advice that is often misunderstood in ways detrimental to a student’s progress.
A second key feature involves keeping anatomy and physiology distinct from the folk science of yoga / ayurveda. While Kaminoff and Matthews do refer to ideas like prana and apana, they do so in a broad, conceptual way that doesn’t conflate said ideas with science. A common problem in yoga texts is conflation of science with folk science such that confused readers are left with a muddle of puzzle pieces that don’t belong to the same puzzle.
Finally, as one who’s found pranayama (breathwork) to be one of the most profoundly transformative elements of a yoga practice, I appreciated that the book not only had a chapter on breath dynamics, but that all the posture discussions included a “breath inquiry” section that encouraged readers to reflect upon the effect of the posture on breathing, as well as suggesting ways in which a practitioner might experiment to improve one’s breathing.
The only criticism I have is that many of the text-boxes in the early chapters seemed to contain random information that could have been incorporated into the text, into footnotes, or edited out altogether. [In contrast to the aforementioned “Cueing Callout” boxes that had a clear and distinct purpose.] If you’re a yoga teacher or dedicated practitioner without a deep scientific background, you’d be hard-pressed to do better than this book for learning about the anatomy of yoga.
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Blur [Haiku]
bright pink flowers, staring 'til they blur - my mind quiets
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Balance & the Value of Learning to Fall
I saw something sad in the park this morning. A boy was trying to learn to ride a bicycle, but I could see that he never would — not with his present approach. Why? He had one training wheel, and the bike was leaning about 15-degrees off vertical as he struggled to use the bicycle as a tricycle. I could see that the metal arm that supported the training wheel was starting to bend from the strain — thus making the lean ever more pronounced. [Incidentally, with two training wheels, I think he might rapidly learn to ride because he’d experience tipping from one side to the other, through the balance point.]
I’ve told yoga students before that there are three timelines for learning inversions (upside-down postures, which all require one’s body to learn to balance 180-degrees out of phase with the balance we all mastered as toddlers.) The first timeline is if you are willing to learn break-falls (i.e. how to safely land when — not if, it will happen — one loses balance.) If so, one can learn any inversion (that one is otherwise physically capable of performing) in an afternoon. Second, if one gets near (but not up against) a wall, and only uses the wall when one is falling towards over-rotation, then one can learn the inversion in a month — give or take. Finally, one can lean up against the wall for a million years and one will not spontaneously develop the capacity to independently do the posture. Why? Because one’s center of gravity is outside one’s body, which means one is in a perpetually unstable state, and one cannot stabilize into a balanced position from a state of falling (and leaning is just falling with a barrier in the way.)
Finding balance requires that the body be able to adjust toward any available direction to counteract the beginning of a fall in the opposite direction. I was fortunate to have studied a martial art that required learning break-falls from the outset, this made learning balances (not just inversions, but also arm balances, standing balances, etc.) much easier because there was no great concern about falling. I knew my body could fall without being injured.
Without falling there’s no learning balance, and if you only fall into the under-rotated position, you are still not learning to achieve stable balance. At some point, you will need to experience the dread fall towards over-rotation.
Time to ditch the training wheels.
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Flame Mind [Common Meter]
His eyes take in the dancing flame until his mind is flame. He anticipates its flutter, its flareups, just the same. There's nothing in his mind or eye that is not set ablaze. He knows not whether it's been like this for hours, weeks, or days. Others think it will devour him, leaving a pile of ash, taking him from this world at once, in one big, blinding flash.
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BOOK REVIEW: Indian Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction by Sue Hamilton
Indian Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction by Sue HamiltonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
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A concise guide to Indian Philosophy is a tall order. Over millennia, the discipline has had time to swell. This necessitated some careful pruning and selection on the part of the author. While the book does present key distinctions between all six of the orthodox schools of Indian Philosophy (i.e. Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Samkhya, Yoga, Mimamsa, and Vedanta,) the only one of the heterodox schools that it substantially addresses is that of Buddhism. (There are three major heterodox schools of Indian Philosophy by most accounts – Caravaka, Buddhist, and Jain, though some also include Ajivika and Ajnana to make five.)
This book focuses on the most novel ideas of each of philosophical schools under study, and it particularly focuses on points of debate where there is disagreement within or between schools. The book, therefore, moves metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology, but doesn’t explore all major philosophical questions for all the schools.
If you’re looking for a book that sums up the key points of debate between and within major schools of Indian philosophy, this is a great book. It does the job quite well and with a minimal page count. If you need a book that offers insight into more than the major points of contention, but extends into a given school’s stance on some of the less provocative questions, I’d recommend Chatterjee and Datta’s “An Introduction to Indian Philosophy” (it’s much longer and denser, but dives deeper and farms wider.)
I like how this book was organized and thought it did a good job of being both concise and clear (a duo that doesn’t play well together with regards complex philosophical subjects.)
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POEM: Yoga for Giraffes
Surely, I have misunderstood,
“Put my head where, you say?”
“But I have bones, don’t you know?”
“I wish I could obey.”
“Now, you say, my feet are too wide?”
“Really, what the heck!”
“You said put my head ‘tween my feet,
have you seen my frickin’ neck?”
“I wasn’t built to stand on my head!”
“What do you mean, ‘We’ll see?'”
“I’m not sure that you’re acquainted
with a thing called gravity.”
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POEM: Spine
Flex forward and a row of rounded, fleshy knobs form in that muscled valley — straight and evenly-spaced.
Chest up & shoulders back and the knobs shrink, enshrouded; while those low, rolling knolls become bounded by scapular cliffs.
Dance about and a million topographies form and disband: all without a sharp corner — nothing but smooth transitions, gracefully made.
Fronts get all the attention, but backs are masters of the beauty of subtle change.
My spine bends and flexes, and I’m alive.
Sparks run in riffles down that line, and I’m alive.
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POEM: Yoga
The moment when you’re everything
and are, at once, nothing.
Time exists, but is lost to you —
no lagging, nor rushing.
Space is the world that expands and
collapses with each breath —
the infinity through which you
stretch beyond life and death.
And in quiet moments of mind,
when no voices call out,
it becomes still enough to feel
something within you sprout.
