Downward Facing Snow Petals
Instructions, Tagged for Future Retrieval
for Sally M.
Unplug from wherever you’ve been today,
feel it melting out the back of your head,
eighty-six the chatter, find your dog,
wag your dog’s tail, draw your knees
to your chest, give yourself a hug, ride
the ripple of the breath, let each exhale
drop you off somewhere new, for a few inhales
stop predicting what will happen next,
observe the debate between the left body
and the right (does one side thinks it’s stronger?),
keep your mind as clear as a windshield–
if the windshield’s dirty, you won’t notice
one more splattered bug, widen your legs
like you’re straddling an elephant, squat
like a jockey on a race horse, flip
yourself over like a pancake, tether
your shoulder blades, hips, and heels to the floor–
have a sense of entitlement to the places where
you’re anchored to the earth, settle like a fish
dropping to sleep at the bottom of the ocean.
What would Patanjali say?
Red in Sphinx pose.
My Thai fisherman’s pants arrived from California today, just in time for a yoga class! I ended up fiddling with the tie at the waist during class, which interrupted the moving mediation a bit, but I think the problem will be solved by wearing a top that doesn’t come untucked.
These pants make me feel way cooler than I really am.
–My son after trying on his new duds.
The roomy legs are just right for lunges, monkey pose (hanumanasana), and any other pose that requires maximum range of movement.
It took over a month for the pants to arrive because I ordered a pair for each person in my family (plus two pairs for me), and the company (Thai Fisherpants) waited until my order was complete to send out the package. That’s OK–the pants are worth the wait. They don’t charge for shipping, and they buy the pants directly from Thailand, which means savings for me and a fair price to the people who make the pants.
The best part about the Thai Fisherpants company is that they publish poems on their site in praise of fisherman’s pants.
I highly recommend these pants for people who want to get away with wearing their pajamas on the street. So comfy!
Yogini is the feminine form of yogin, and signifies a female practitioner of yoga. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries in India, very few women were encouraged to practice yoga, which was taught mainly through a male lineage.
Krishamacharaya in a form of pincha mayarasana, a forearm balancing pose. His back looks very powerful, doesn’t it?
In the early half of the twentieth century, the yogi Krishamacharaya revived the science of yoga and preserved the study enough so that we today can benefit from the practice of yoga. Krishamacharaya was the teacher of B.K.S. Iyengar and K. Pattabhi Jois, both of whom brought yoga to the west. Iyengar teaches a series of precisely aligned postures.The fault in the alignment of the body can reflect an overabundance of the student’s ego.
Ashtanga yoga, the original flow-style yoga brought to the West by students of K. Pattabhi Jois, is an energetic style of yoga that covers the same poses each time, depending on the series. I have only been able to complete series I and parts of series II. Each series takes at least one hour and thirty minutes to complete.
One of the first females to become well-known for her altered states of well being through yoga is Endira Devi, a poet, dancer and spiritual person who is known to have reached extended states of bliss, understood in yogic terminology as samhadi.
