The Yogini from Manila

March 4, 2008
by Yogajane
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Moon Days, Mysore and Pranayama with Paul Dallaghan (March 8 & 9, 2008)

Yoga Manila brings Paul Dallaghan back for two days in March — March 8 & 9.

Paul is a frequent yoga guest instructor at Yoga Manila and is a founder of Yoga Thailand. This time, he will conduct the following classes:

March 8 (Saturday)

8:00 – 9:00 am Pranayama

9:00 – 10:30 am Moon Day class

March 9 (Sunday)

8:00 – 9:00 am Pranayama

9:00 – 10:30 am Mysore class
Rate is P700 per class. All classes will be held at their Makati studio. Reservations accepted till March 5.

All levels can attend Moon Day class, a led class for both beginners and advanced students in which Paul “focuses on bringing mindfulness into asana practice”.

Mysore is for those with working knowledge of the primary series.

Pranayama is recommended for experienced yoga practitioners.

Here is link to their Reservation Form.

March 4, 2008
by Yogajane
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Yoga Trance Dance with Teresa Herrera (March 7 & 21, 2008)

Pulse Yoga is holding a trance dance with Teresa Herrera on March 7 & 21, 2008, 7:30 PM at their studio along 23 Florida St., Greenhills, San Juan City.

What is a Trance Dance?

The Pulse Yoga website describes it as follows:

“Yoga Trance Dance is an exploration of the eternal flow of natural movement through yoga. Beginning with sahaja (spontaneous) prana yoga or the experience of prana initiating yoga asanas, yoga trance dance flows into an exploration of free-form, breath driven movement to liberate one’s creative life-force and cultivate embodied freedom.

Dance and yoga, particularly hatha yoga, are ways of calling us back into our bodies to irrigate our being with life energy known in yoga as “prana.” Prana is the animating force the energy of being alive and is most clearly felt through breathing. From the yogic view, the great breath flowing through us all is intelligence or consciousness itself. With flow yoga, we let the intelligence of our breath lead movement the way a sailor tacks with the wind. Trance dance has a similar focus. Rather than emphasizing an outward performance, the goal of trance dancing is to let your creative energy move through you to be guided by spirit (or “spiritus,” which is the Latin root for inspiration the place where life breath and enlivening creativity meet). Thus, in yoga trance dance, form serves spirit, structure supports intuition, yoga prepares you for free-form dance, and your dance opens your being for a greater experience of the unified self that is yoga.”

For more information, click HERE.

And for advance notice on more of Teresa Herrera events, I read in MahaMondo’s blog that she will be conducting a yoga dive/retreat off Tubbataha reefs (Palawan) from May 12-17, 2008. Watch for this, if you are adventurous enough to combine yoga with snorkeling, scuba diving and kayaking.

February 24, 2008
by Yogajane
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My Current Yoga Reads (Feb 2008)

Intermission from blogging. Short plug.

Reading is becoming a luxury due to work. But just before going to bed lately, I have tried to squeeze in a few pages of readings. There are 2 yoga books which I currently read alternately. One of them addresses the health benefits of yoga; the other one feeds my soul.

Probably due to my painful experience with kidney stones and after having seen how yoga has actually improved my gynecological condition, I have been having this growing desire to continue studying how various asanas affect the different organs, limbs, muscles and body systems. More and more it seems as though almost every ailment can be addressed by one, several or a combination of various asanas when practiced regularly. Yoga as Medicine, which I mentioned in a previous post, is helping me understand more and appreciate the benefits it brings to me health-wise.

The Secret Power of Yoga was something I discovered today at Fully Booked. Thumbing through the first few pages, I knew in my heart that this was one I just had to read.

Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, the principles at the heart of all yoga practice, have always been translated and interpreted by men. As a result, the author Nischala Joy Devi writes, it is not easily understood by the women who practice yoga as these address what she calls the “left brain” or logical side. In her book, Devi (who has studied the Yoga Sutras for many years under Yogiraj Sri Swami Satchidananda, interprets them “from a heart-centered, intuitive, feminine perspective, resulting in the first translation intended for women.”

Do you have favorite yoga books you wish to recommend? Leave me a comment here.

February 18, 2008
by Yogajane
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Sanskrit’s Link to Tagalog

This is a slightly off-topic post but I thought it was interesting to tackle the similarities that I see in the Sanskrit language to one of the major dialects in my country — Tagalog.

(May Śiva bless those who take delight in the language of the gods. ( by Kalidasa)

This curiosity was always there ever since we began hearing the different names of our asanas. When I first started yoga, Pio would call out the poses in English. He would say Lotus, Forward Bend, Downward Dog, Shoulderstand, etc. After a while though, he started calling them out in Sanskrit.

One day a FilAm yogini, Kristina, left a comment on this blog and told me she studies a lot of Sanskrit in New York. Now that sounded interesting for someone living all the way across the globe! So I began searching for common words I knew in Tagalog which take its roots from Sanskrit. After all, when I stayed in Indonesia for several months, I always delighted in little day-to-day discoveries of Filipino words which were the same as Bahasa: gunting (scissors), payong (umbrella), anak (child), halo (mix), lima (5), nasi (rice) and salamat (thanks).

Here are some Tagalog words I found which are taken from the Sanskrit language:

asa (hope) – asha in Sanskrit

salita (speak) – cerita in Sanskrit

balita (news) – berita in Sanskrit

karma (karma)

mukha (face)

guro (teacher) – guru in Sanskrit

dalita (suffering) – dharta in Sanskrit

In the site Tagalog 101, this is what they say:

“Philologically, Tagalog belongs to the Malayan branch of the great Malayo-Polynesian linguistic family, which extends from Hawaii to Madagascar and from Formosa to Easter Island west of Chile, including New Zealand, Tonga, and Samoa, as well as Borneo, Celebes, Java, Sumatra, the Malay Peninsula, and the Philippines from east to west, a distance of 180º, or half the circumference of the earth.

Tagalog, together with other civilized tongues of the Philippines, such as Visayan, Pampango, Ilocano and Bicol, has preserved the verbal system better than any other. The basis for the comparative study of the family must be taken from the Philippine tongues and not from the more cultivated Malay, Kawi, or modern Javanese, all three of which have been profoundly affected by Sanskrit and to a lesser degree Arabic, something as English has been affected by Latin and French elements. The number of roots or primitive-idea words in Tagalog seems to be about 17, 000 there being 16, 842 words in the Noceda and Sanlucar dictionary of 1832. Of these some 284 are derived from the Sanskrit, and are evidently borrowed through the Malay. Many of these are names for the things unknown to the primitive Malayan peoples, but others are abstracts and various words, some of which would seem to have supplanted a primitive Malayan word. Thus in may cases Americans and Tagalogs use words in their own languages which are from the same remote source in India, and coming around the earth east and west to meet again in the Philippines.”

Next time your teacher calls out asanas in Sanskrit and you feel all strange about it, just remember that we are historically linked to it.

Namasté (नमस्ते [nʌmʌsˈteː]

February 17, 2008
by Yogajane
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Mastering Jump-Throughs

In some of our classes lately, my teacher Pio Baquiran has been making us try jump-throughs as transition from downward dogs. What we do isn’t even the full jump-through where you swing both legs forward and through your arms from Downward Dog and land with both feet straight out in front of you in a seated position. What Pio makes us do is land with legs crossed. And even that is quite a challenge.

There are days when I get through, barely. On other days, I kind of land awkwardly with a thump, cross-legged. And there was a time when I almost toppled forward as one of my legs snagged against an arm. I also get that tensed-up feeling whenever we are asked to do this — maybe because of an innate fear of falling again.

So once again, off to the internet I went trying to find out what suggestions were out there to make jump-throughs less “painful”.

Tim Miller, an Ashtanga student and a writer for Yoga Journal, makes this suggestion for those new to this transition:

To build a sense of confidence and competence, first try this maneuver with blocks under the hands. From Adho Mukha Svanasana (Downward Facing Dog), exhale and bend the knees deeply so the ribs come back against the thighs, lift the heels and allow the hips to descend. Keep the hips as low as possible as you spring forward. Ideally, the body stays in a full forward bend even as it comes through the arms.

Remember to support the movement with your breath. Jumping through at the end of an exhalation, when you are completely empty of breath, is best because the exhalation also facilitates deeper movement into the forward bending position. You will also find strength and support by engaging the abdomen and pelvic floor in Uddiyana (Flying Up Lock) and Mula Bandha (Root Lock). So as you set yourself up to jump through, remember to exhale, keep the bandhas engaged, remain in forward flexion, and stay close to the ground.

However, he and David Swenson differ in some other ways. Tim suggests that since the legs are longer than the arms, they must be kept as parallel to the floor as possible during flight to successfully come through. He says that the mistake new students to this make is keeping their hips high so that the legs remain vertical.

In the Ashtanga Yoga Practice Manual, however, David Swenson’s original insights on the “physics of flight” suggest that we imagine ourselves like a ball being hurled across a room with a high ceiling. Unlike a low ceiling where you need to hurl the ball straight ahead and with great force, throwing a ball in a room with a high ceiling means less force and the ball actually makes a high, graceful arc which we want for our jump-throughs.

Just imagining the 2 suggestions, I would think David Swenson’s suggestion might work better for me. But I would imagine this requires practice, practice, practice before I can even make this transition gracefully and seamlessly.

Yoga instructor Jenny Sugar shows some preparatory transitions prior to the complete jump-through using yoga blocks.

And hopefully, some day, I can do a jump-through that looks like this:

February 17, 2008
by Yogajane
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Laughter Yoga Comes to Manila

They walk around greeting each other, handshaking, with resounding “Ho Ho’s” and “Ha Ha’s”. Very soon, what often starts out as fake laughter turns real.

The unique concept of Laughter Yoga and Laughter Club is the brain child of Dr. Madan Kataria, a physician from Mumbai, India, and his wife Madhuri Kataria. It does not require knowledge of asanas, no cracking of jokes — just plain and simple laughing.

Dr. Kataria believes that laughter is one of the best defenses against stress. He claims that “Twenty minutes of hearty laughter is equivalent to 10 minutes on an exercise bike.” Laughing fosters improved cardiovascular health and reduced blood pressure. Scientific studies show that laughter boosts our body’s oxygen and energy levels and also boosts levels of immune cells that attack cancer, infection and virus. Laughter releases endorphins, a natural pain killer that is responsible for the ‘runner’s high’. Those who run laughter clubs claim that laughter yoga sessions stimulate the lymphatic system and boost our immune system, and can reduce levels of stress poisons in our bodies by 50% or more within an hour.

Children laugh a lot; adults, however, need a stimuli to start laughing — which is why laughter clubs have been cropping up.

In a Feb. 10, 2008 Philippine Star article, laughter yoga has come to Manila. Elvie Estavillo, a businesswoman and mother of three, is starting laughter yoga in the Philippines and hopes to start the very first laughter club in the country soon. Elvie was diagnosed in 2000 with cysts in the breast and cervix but attributes “my healing to laughter–of course, with God’s help. But I was healed.”

Personally, I reserve judgement on the veracity of the healing claims of laughter yoga. But whatever benefits laughing brings can do no harm. At the very least, it helps one start out the day bright, with plenty of positive energy and without a doubt, laughter is definitely a de-stresser. Maybe there is indeed some truth to the title of a joke section in one of my favorite, long-time magazines, Reader’s Digest: LAUGHTER IS THE BEST MEDICINE.

Want some idea of what laughter yoga is about? Watch this CNN video, thanks to Dr. Kataria’s YouTube channel.

February 14, 2008
by Yogajane
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Valentine’s Day — Yoga for the Heart

It just crossed midnight a while back and though I had planned on an early bedtime, I thought of blog hopping to see if anyone had posted about Valentine’s. It so happened Nadine did and she had really great suggestions for a yoga sequence that would open up the heart chakra, appropriate for this day of hearts.

A great way I can think of to start off these asanas is with a time of extended meditation. As you sit in Padmasana, close your eyes and breathe slowly and deeply. Calm your mind and be receptive to the love you wish to give and receive this day. Thank the Lord for all the people who have made your life meaningful and ask Him to bless your yoga practice for this day.

Follow through the meditation with these asanas suggested by Nadine:

Dynamic Tadasana –
Stand in Tadasana. Become aware of your breath, of your heart beating, of your whole system working in unity.

When you are ready, inhale to raise your arms out to the sides and up, rising on to tiptoes, bring your palms to meet overhead. Exhale to bring hands to your sides and heels to the mat.
Repeat 6 times

Warrior 1/Warrior 2 Vinyasa –
Step your left foot forward, your right foot back, aligning the feet through the midline of the body if you can.

Inhale to come into Virabadrasana 1 (Warrior 1), exhale to straighten the front leg and draw your hands to your heart in namaste.

Then inhale to come into Virabadrasana 2 (Warrior 2), exhale to straighten the front leg and draw your hands to your heart in namaste.

Cycle through this vinyasa 6 times on each side.

Sun Salutes –
As many as you want, spend extra time in your lunges and upward dogs.

Then lie down in a comfortable supported backbend like Supta Baddha Konasana, sometimes known as Reclining Goddess Pose. In this position, let your breath become smooth and even, matching inhale to exhale. When you feel centred, and your breath feels steady and comfortable, imagine that you are sending love to those who need it with every exhalation, and receiving love with every inhalation. Notice who comes to mind when you think of giving love, and who comes to mind when you think of receiving love. Spend as long as you want with this imagery.

And after you are done with your asanas, go do something special for your loved ones. It could be a phone call to your father or mother (which I will do as I have been busy the past weeks to even remember to chat with my Mom). It could be warm hugs to friends or, as in my case, to my kids and hubby. It could be a text to someone dear to you, just to say he/she is remembered on this day. Or an unexpected visit.

Whatever it is that you decide to do, it will be yoga for your heart. May it always remain open to giving and receiving love unconditionally.

♥♥♥ And I am sending you all my warmest hugs and love on Valentine’s Day! ♥♥♥

February 10, 2008
by Yogajane
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Beautiful Yoga Quotes

I thought of surfing the net to look for quotes appropriate for a practising yogini like me and you. Here are some of the ones I found which hit close to my heart.

Which one speaks to you? Do leave a comment and let me know…

Yoga teaches us to cure what need not be endured and endure what cannot be cured. ~B.K.S. Iyengar

You cannot do yoga. Yoga is your natural state. What you can do are yoga exercises, which may reveal to you where you are resisting your natural state. ~Sharon Gannon

Yoga is possible for anybody who really wants it. Yoga is universal…. But don’t approach yoga with a business mind looking for worldly gain. ~Sri Krishna Pattabhi Jois

By embracing your mother wound as your yoga, you transform what has been a hindrance in your life into a teacher of the heart. ~Phillip Moffitt

Yoga is 99% practice and 1% knowledge. ~Sri Krishna Pattabhi Jois

Anyone who practices can obtain success in yoga but not one who is lazy. Constant practice alone is the secret of success. ~Svatmarama, Hatha Yoga Pradipika

Yoga is the practice of quieting the mind. ~Patanjali, translated from Sanskrit

When you inhale, you are taking the strength from God. When you exhale, it represents the service you are giving to the world. ~B.K.S. Iyengar

Inhale, and God approaches you. Hold the inhalation, and God remains with you. Exhale, and you approach God. Hold the exhalation, and surrender to God. ~Krishnamacharya

Yoga is difficult for the one whose mind is not subdued. ~Bhagavad Gita

In karma yoga no effort is ever lost, and there is no harm. Even a little practice of this discipline protects one from greater fear (of birth and death). ~ Bhagavad Gita

When the breath wanders the mind also is unsteady. But when the breath is calmed the mind too will be still, and the yogi achieves long life. Therefore, one should learn to control the breath. ~Svatmarama, Hatha Yoga Pradipika

For breath is life, and if you breathe well you will live long on earth. ~Sanskrit Proverb

Namaste.

February 3, 2008
by Yogajane
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As My Body Speaks, I Listen

My work lately has been turning more and more stressful and demanding and it has changed my need for yoga, at least at this point in time.

Because the office demands a lot of focus, time-pressured deadlines, micro-managing situations, I find myself always hurrying here and there, eating later than usual, stressing out, and breathing in shallowly. At the end of the day, my body craves recharging and I find myself no longer looking forward as much as before to intense yoga sessions where more demands would be made of my already tired body.

I want to go at my own pace and not have to keep up with the rest of the class. I miss the moments of meditation that we used to have which calmed me prior to starting my asanas. I just want to breathe in and out for as long as I wish to, not hurried, no time limits.

Just back to basics — at least for a while.

Today, I went to the gym. I had the room all to myself. I must have spent 15 minutes in quiet meditation, breathing in and out as deeply as I could, clearing my mind, projecting positive feelings, letting go of my office concerns. I could feel the tired areas of my body being slowly renewed with just my breath. Then, as I began the asanas, I spent time on each pose, adjusting and deepening whenever I could but becoming more aware of how my body was responding to each type of asana. Whenever I felt inflexibility in joints that once were flexible (during my more regular yoga days), I would go only as far as I could, then let go, accepting that this was my body’s present limitation. I set my own pace according to what my body could do, counting slowly, holding as long as possible, deepening whenever I could, easing up when I couldn’t.

For now, I wish to listen to my body and what it needs; and I am incorporating once again some form of meditation as part of it. I want to learn more about yoga techniques that incorporate the breath as part of the detoxification process.

Until my project eases up, I foresee more hours on self yoga than in in-class workouts. But I think that if I am able to spend more time meditating and breathing deeply, I can go back to work the next day better prepared to tackle its demands.

January 30, 2008
by Yogajane
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Karma Yoga

My teacher, Pio Baquiran, sent a text asking if I wanted to join their feeding program last January 26, 2008 for about 1,700 children. Unfortunately, the invite came too late. I had prior commitments I could not back away from. Nevertheless, I was able to get some insight from him as to how this event came about.

Before becoming a full-time yoga teacher, Pio was heavily involved in the feeding programs of his ISKCON community — penetrating barangays in Makati, Pasay and other places in the Metro. He was a familiar sight in these barangays. As he told me about this program over the phone, I could sense from his voice that this was something he loved doing.

Auspiciously, one of his students at the Vinyasa Yoga Center, Stella, was a volunteer social worker who hailed from Australia. Together with Pio’s ISKCON community in Manila, Stella organized the event which was held at Museo Pambata. It included a concert which lasted till the evening featuring the songs of Joey Ayala and others.

[portfolio_slideshow]

Pio calls this activity “Karma Yoga”. Hmmm, never heard that before! Being a Catholic, I knew next to nothing about karma yoga. So off I went to the internet and googled its background and this is what I found out in Wikipedia:

The word Karma is derived from the Sanskrit Kri, meaning ‘to do’, in its most basic sense karma simply means action, and yoga translates to union. Thus Karma yoga literally translates to the path of union through action. It is described as a way of acting, thinking and willing by which one acts in accordance with one’s duty (dharma) without consideration of personal selfish desires, likes or dislikes. Acting without being attached to the fruits of one’s deeds.

As with a number of other philosophies in Hinduism, Karma yoga is based on the general understandings of karma and reincarnation (samsara). It is believed that a man is born with certain Samskars (karma’s), both positive and negative, from his past lives which push him towards performing certain actions in his present one. This process continues until the individual attains a zero balance, (no karma remains) wherein one achieves liberation.

For me, this is what sets my teacher apart from many other instructors of yoga, some of whom focus more on body fitness. He lives out his faith and beliefs in his day-to-day life. While the teaching of yoga is his current mission, he has not forgotten to translate his beliefs into positive deeds that improve the quality of life for his fellow man, most of all, the children.

I may not share the same religious faith as him but knowing that my teacher goes beyond the confines of the yoga shala to make life a little better for others reassures me that my yoga practice under him has a spiritual dimension to it beyond what many simply view as ‘another fitness program’.

Namaste.