Yoga teacher training is opening up my eyes to a whole new world.
As part of my yoga teacher training, we attend Kirtans, a lovely, free-form mash-up of music, call and response, and chanting. I’d never been to one before, and to be honest had never even heard of them. Now I wish I had known about them years ago!
Events · Tue Oct 27, 2009
The Breathing Project is hosting David Sykes and his Harmonic Choir, “the world’s leading overtone choir,” this Friday, October 30 at 7:30pm. What is harmonic singing? From the website:
Harmonic Chant is part of a 14-billion year old tradition — the harmonic presence illuminating every nook and cranny of the cosmic space. Those subtle waves of photonal warmth, the cosmic background radiation, still radiate across the sky in every direction, in waves as wide as 2 full moons.
“David Hykes’s music is haunting and transporting. It takes you some place like the Sahara desert, somewhere completely otherworldly. It transports you to the Ancient Time.
While searching for music for my film ‘Travellers and Magicians,’ I listened to so much music. But I always came back to David’s. From the moment I heard it, there was no doubt.” — Revered incarnate Tibetan lama Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche
It’s not quite chanting, not quite ambient techno. It’s sure to vibrate your brain in a million directions. If you’ve never heard this type of thing, it’s worth experiencing in person.
Watch a performance on YouTube
Tickets are $35. All proceeds go to benefit the Breathing Project’s teacher training scholarship fund. There’s also a workshop with David Sykes the next day (Halloween) from 6-9pm.
Miscellaneous · Tue Sep 22, 2009
What are you looking at?
Ahoy people! Someone nice has gone and interviewed me. What are the hidden gems of the NYC yoga scene? What’s the best music for yoga practice? How awesome is the Yogoer iPhone app? I know these are the questions keeping you up at night. So go ahead and read the full interview on MindBodyGreen!
You can spend quite a while there, reading inspiring interviews and illuminating overviews. MindBodyGreen is a great new digest of healthy living content. I just learned The 7 P’s of Goal Setting! Plus, you can vote up any news article, or submit one yourself. Enjoy!
Miscellaneous · Wed Jul 22, 2009
Yesterday was one of those days when a mom comes close to going crazy and can’t wait for 5 o’clock just to have a glass of wine for sanity purposes. As I washed off the dog poop that my son stepped in, I thought, “Am I seriously washing off disgusting, wet, dog poop in my kitchen sink?” I proceed to pick up the rest of the poop in the backyard so that he can run around freely with the garden hose in his diaper (he doesn’t know the difference, and to him, it could be the South of France). Afterwards, I raked the leaves on the side of the house in the sweltering heat and thought, “How is this fun?” Then, the plumber bangs on the door just as I got my little man to go down for a nap. As I opened the door to this this man with a look of rage, I wondered if I had thrown my sanity out the window. The poor guy didn’t know he was coming to fix the toilet at Miss Hannigan’s.
I felt trapped in this house and in this neighborhood. I wanted to scream, “Get me out! Get me back to New York City,” but was this my life now? Was this my destiny – waiting for plumbers and singing Knick Knack Patty Wack all day? I wondered if my brain was melting or still intact.
By the time my husband came home to take me to the concert that I had been anticipating for months, I was exhausted and not in the finest of moods. How could he understand? He just finished a day of Internet surfing, coffee talk, and engaging business calls, where he actually used his brain. He must have wondered where his wife went. He was hoping to take her to see Coldplay, not this crazy girl.
That night as I watched Chris Martin maniacally run across the stage singing, “I know St. Peter won’t call my name,” from the popular song Viva La Vida. I thought to myself, “The life of a rock star – what fun. He is not picking up poop and waiting for plumbers all day.”
Then, I had a revelation – my son thinks I’m Coldplay! We have a daily tradition – I turn on Viva La Vida, he’ll get a big grin on his face and hold out his arms so I’ll pick him up and we dance. He thinks I’m a rock star as I play my air guitar and sing to him. He doesn’t know that I’m actually not Chris Martin! In that moment, I realized the beauty of a child and how my son means everything to me. I realized that being a mother is the most important role that I will ever have and that there is honor in picking up poop and singing Knick Knack Patty Wack for your biggest fan.
I wondered off yoga talk today, but these are the thoughts of a Yoga Mamma. I need my practice more than ever today and I am headed to it right now. I intend to put my hands together, breathe and find the peace and beauty in my current life role as mother.
Namaste,
YogaMamma
Events · Wed May 27, 2009
Wanderlust Festival
Ok, I was AWOL for a few days, but I’m back. With some exciting updates coming soon.
Firstly: if you have not yet locked up your summer, there’s a cool festival happening near San Francisco July 24–26. Wanderlust is a “music and lifestyle retreat” — meaning the headliners include both musicians and yoga teachers. Looks like more indie rock than kirtan:
And some major yoga personalities as well:
Too bad I’m locked up on the East Coast for now. I’ve been listening to some of the tracks on the web site and am blissing out.
More updates to come…
Miscellaneous · Wed May 6, 2009
Well, I’m back in the city again. A few days in Florida with my mom filled me up on oranges (and blues and greens). I feel sunny inside, even if it’s not so much outside.
With the return to city life came the return to Twitter, CNN, texting, and emails. (I could have continued them through my trip, but chose to take a fairly full break.) And, happily, the Times, which today published a great article on the science of concentration. We know we’re living in the Age of Distraction; Winifred Gallagher wrote Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life to refocus our attention on our control of the matter: “…your choices determine your experience, just as William James said.” (‘My experience is what I agree to attend to.’)
It’s like that old Ann Landers advice: no one can take advantage of you unless you let them. We can only be distracted by incessant emails if we choose to obsessively check them, or keep that notifier on. We can choose to wake up and run to our devices, or we can choose to first gather our thoughts at another table.
But what about those taxi rides / offices / airports / companions full of noise and distractions, out of our control?
Ms. Gallagher advocates meditation to increase your focus, but she says there are also simpler ways to put the lessons of attention researchers to use. Once she learned how hard it was for the brain to avoid paying attention to sounds, particularly other people’s voices, she began carrying ear plugs with her. When you’re trapped in a noisy subway car or a taxi with a TV that won’t turn off, she says you have to build your own “stimulus shelter.”
And a bit of practical advice:
She recommends starting your work day concentrating on your most important task for 90 minutes. At that point your prefrontal cortex probably needs a rest, and you can answer e-mail, return phone calls and sip caffeine (which does help attention) before focusing again. But until that first break, don’t get distracted by anything else, because it can take the brain 20 minutes to do the equivalent of rebooting after an interruption.
The last interesting takeaway was about scientists’ use of rhythmic light to assist our concentration. Regular, tiny pulses of light can create gamma waves in the brain, which are associated with focus and perception. This direct synchronization of neurons is interesting — I’ll be sure to consider strobe lights for my office — but I’m surprised the article did not mention music, a much more accessible assistant. Electronic music, with its lack of narrative and focus on atmosphere, does a great job of consolidating the fluctuations of the mind. (I posted a few favorite albums for yoga last month.) As background music, it’s often better than silence for concentration. There are even albums like “The Brainwave Suite” that promise to create alpha, theta, or delta brain waves with various ambient soundtracks. (I don’t know why they left out gamma.)
So, hopefully we can all learn to focus amid the symphony of modern life a bit better. Or we can stay on our smart phones, walking straight into traffic, and wait for Darwin to weed us out.
Home Practice · Tue Apr 7, 2009
Last night I tried to practice yoga with Clap Your Hands And Say Yeah. It was a rainy day and I needed some energy. Instead it pushed me into listening mode, I just lay on the floor enjoying the album for a while, until I finally got up and practiced in silence.
So, today I decided to share my five fail-safe albums for yoga practice. I exclude kirtan from this list; if it’s any good it makes me want to sing to a distracting extent. In fact, anything with words is excluded. I like practice music to soothe and smooth any rough moods, and add an uplifting vibe. I’d call my favorite genre “symphonic electronic” — complex abstract music. These are albums you can play straight through without skipping a song.
Ratatat, self-titled. My all-time favorite album, I have yet to get tired of this thing. Two guys, a million effects, gorgeous textures and rhythms. It made the rounds of all the coffee houses a few years ago, and is perfect for bright, focused energy. It makes me so happy.
Brian Eno, Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks. The most famous ambient album? Apparently Eno was hit by a taxi, and couldn’t stand any music while recuperating in the hospital. So he invented ambient. This album is an opiate, and the track “An Ending (Ascent)” is pretty perfect. Quiet and soothing.
Four Tet, Rounds. A beautiful album by Kieran Hebden from Fridge (another nice electronic group). Blissful and romantic; drum samples and heartbeats underlay enchanting melodies. Perfect mix tape fodder.
Bibio, Fi. A quirky mix of finger-picking, reverb, and synths. The soundtrack to a flashback to childhood. Dreamy and gentle.
Dub Specialists, Dub. This will have to represent the whole genre of reggae, the best morning music ever. It makes you want to move, without any stress. Classic and groovy, this album chills me ouuuuuuuut.All these artists have more recent albums out, I have not kept up 100%. I also have to mention Beirut for sheer heart, if they would put out an instrumental album I would die.
Any favorite practice albums you want to share? Comment away!
Events · Wed Dec 17, 2008
If you are interested in the range of sounds and vibrations the human body can make (I’ve always loved opera for that reason), check out Alash at Barbes in Brooklyn tomorrow. I heard them last night at a friend’s party, and they’re supposedly up for a Grammy? They do overtone singing on top of traditional Tuvan folk music. That’s between Mongolia and Siberia.
Here’s a clip, although like opera I think it’s only great in person. You can hear the throat singing around 0:53.
POSTSCRIPT: The show was REALLY amazing, and their manager shared a lot of interesting stories and background. They are indeed up for 2 Grammys with Bela Fleck — they are on his Christmas album Jingle All The Way.
Class Notes · Tue Sep 23, 2008
Paul Manza
Last night there was a new sub for Nancy (who has mostly departed Greenhouse for acupuncture school). The sub was Paul Manza, and I’d somehow heard of him before in a random blog I read, so I hopped on over.
Oh, I just realized he might be the Paul that used to teach at Laughing Lotus! That explains why he looked familiar, and why he played a full-volume party mixtape (Lotus-style): RJD2, Bjork remixes, and Aphex Twin. I almost said something after class, that I played a lot of the same tracks during yoga, but the lameness of that comment was reserved solely for my blog.
Paul was super excited to tell us about his current study of Iyengar yoga. This did not mean he departed from his super calm voice. Rather, we heard 10 minutes about how to keep the chest open while standing, moving, jumping back, all in the support of eventually meditating. “If we’re going to practice all these movements while collapsing the chest, practice collapsing the chest, we might as well do drugs or something. The whole point is that we can open up like this [with arms and chest open] in meditation.” (Not a perfect quote, it was something like that.) His other classes are listed as “Iyengar-inspired Vinyasa,” which has amazingly not been shortened to Iyengasa or Vingar or other Tex-Mex naming mashup. Power Super Vinyaya Glow.
One of his repeated ideas that I really liked was “stay awake, but passive.” This word passive has such negative connotations for me — 50′s housewives, wimpy men, poor grammar — that it was helpful to reclaim it as a good thing. Similar to the Vipassana meditation practice of not doing anything, just being there. (In their retreats, you are not allowed to practice yoga or anything energetic, because their focus is on NOT trying to change things, just becoming aware and accepting things.) I am very visual — if my eyes are open I want to adjust my pose (or someone else’s) — so it was helpful to have a word to direct that energy. (He wouldn’t let us close our eyes.)
We held poses for quite a long time, Iyengar-style. I had a pool of sweat roll off the top off my head and POUR, not drip, onto the mat between my hands. (Luckily, at Greenhouse you scrub your own mats after class.) We did a variation on Extended Side Angle, with the front foot moved to the middle of the mat, that really helped rotate the front hip under. We did a passive Half Moon, stopping in each prep pose, that turned out wonderfully stable and calm.
That’s all for now, it was a good day.
Miscellaneous · Tue Sep 23, 2008
My dad sent me this adorable Devendra Banhart video:
He is so adorable. It’s like the episode of 30 Rock (the one episode I’ve seen, Cougars, click #207) where everyone in the office falls in love with the coffee boy; he’s that cute. I think he’s knocked Johnny Depp off his near-permanent place on the alt-weird-tragic-hotness-puppydog-poetry pedestal. I have his first album, but it’s all acoustic and lo-fi. This video is hilarious.
Yogoer is proudly powered by WordPress. Subscribe to Entries (RSS) or Comments (RSS).
Make time to unwind.
©2010 Yogoer™
