So this past weekend the yoga teacher training was focused on breathing, or pranayama. This is one of the eight petals of yoga. Iygengar says it's pretty dangerous to practice deliberate, harnessed breathing without guidance, and that the potential for depression is high if practiced incorrectly. Man oh man. Well, I already know that the potential for pulling one's back like an over-eager jackass is also pretty high in yoga (oh ye physical discipline of healing), so I can roll with there being dangers in breathing. Oh and here's a youtube of Iyengar taking an inhale and an exhale which is certainly persuasive of the potential for meaningful control of one's breath, regardless of to what extent one credits the effects of such control.
But I do credit the effects - meditation is a breathing exercise, that's the whole thing. And it is profound to feel the unstoppable effort of our diaphragm rising and falling with the inhale and exhale, completely without our effort, like the heartbeat. Really I think the breathing part of yoga is super awesome. This weekend I learned that can isolate my breathing to expand my ribcage solely in the right side of my body. This is rad to me.
But somehow I was drifting a little bit into "yeah okay whatever"-ville during the weekend. Why? We had a guest speaker who studied with T.K.V. Desikachar in India, so that's neat. I should have been more interested in it than I was. For some reason I was very scattered of mind. I was sort of hungry the whole time, which doesn't help my concentration - I was traveling all weekend so my usual persnickety micro-organizing of my physical state was a little bit shambled. What was happening though that I wasn't really super focused on it? Boredom? Nah, I'm a little old for that, I can get what I want out of things without it being slick and ultra-compelling.
Maybe it was the cursory nature? Six hours of talking about and practicing different breathing techniques seems like a lot but it's not. I guess I still want a teacher that I can call my teacher. I remember once the Buddha guy relating a story about his teacher, and he said, "this was before he was my teacher, this was when he was just the guy teaching the class." So I know that having a "teacher" is much more than attending classes with people. I still feel a little bit adrift in my learning process. I can probably bump it up a little by doing all those handy learning things that I know how to do: systematize and break down chunks of information for handy memorizing. That's time consuming and creates a feeling of progress. Maybe I was just a little annoyed that my back was limiting my participation. Maybe I'm lazy.
There was a lot of great and interesting stuff that I got out of it, though. I am going to practice one of the breathing things every day for a few weeks and see how I feel (not that I live any kind of controlled variable way, but we'll see what I notice). And the personal stuff was interesting, too - the guest speaker started out talking about his own journey into yoga practice, and a lot of it rang true to me, and was exciting to hear about. He talked about the process of learning to see himself and how he grieved the loss of his former self even as he was happy to be newly revealed. He talked about finding his ability to concentrate, how he had felt cut adrift in his mind for years, and yoga helped him return to a more focused state of mind. I am really tempted by the focus thing - wouldn't we all like to feel like we can actually do things we are trying to do?
But maybe that's the other problem - I don't feel any particular longing toward some thing that I just wish wish wish I could be doing. Maybe because I'm already doing the yoga and stuff so I don't have to be sitting at my desk wishing I could be doing yoga. But it's still so directionless, all this yoga doing and meditating and reading. It's great, but so what? I would really like to feel some kind of drive toward something specific; but of course maybe that's a hang up and I just need to shed that expectation for myself. I might actually want to be a yoga teacher, a good one, not just a student - that would be a great thing to be working on. I'm not sure yet, though. There's so much to do still, and so much to learn about, and so much practicing to do.
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