Why Guru Nation?

So what’s the deal with my website’s name of Krista’s Guru Nation?  Am I touting myself as a great teacher ready to guide the nation? 

No.  Nope.  It’s more the opposite of that. 

The name came up in a conversation I had with Holden, my 13 year old son, about Fantasy Football.  (Many of our best conversations involve football these days.)  Our nuclear family plus my two brothers formed our own fantasy league this fall and Holden and I were throwing around catchy team names that suited each family member.  We were having fun and really getting the juices flowing when Holden suggested that my team name be “Guru Nation”.  It had a yoga twist, it was bad-ass, and it met my seemingly subconscious desire these days to be in good favor with my son.  It fit perfectly.

As I started building this website as a professional yoga instructor, I still found “Guru Nation” pithy and sassy (like me). But the name “Guru Nation” suggests the opposite of what I have surmised about yoga and what I have personally experienced in my own yoga practice.  Call me crazy, but my quirky old self likes the irony.

Here’s what I mean by suggesting that a nation led by me as a guru is the opposite of my experience with yoga and what I really need to share:

Every single one of us has everything we need right now to affect the changes we want to see in our lives. 

No guru required, but a little guidance from someone on the same path (maybe a yoga instructor like me?) never hurt.  Especially someone who just wants to share the benefits they have found in yoga.  And the practice of yoga gives us techniques we can use to know ourselves better. 

My consistent yoga practice has helped me build energy in my physical body, allowed me a way back to the awareness of my essential, unchanged self without the chatter of my mind obscuring the way.  It has helped me develop a connection between my body, mind and soul.  When I see things more clearly, I tend to make more skillful decisions about how I want to live my life and affect the people and world around me.   

I’m a sucker for a good yogi biography and one of my favorites has been Yoga and the Quest for the True Self by Stephen Cope (author, yogi, and psychologist). In it, the author writes about his experience living in a yoga hermitage for ten years.  This is what he discovers in the end: 

“Before yoga, before meditation… that grace had been with me all along.  It had always been there…. Whenever we relinquish our craving, clinging, and grasping; whenever we stop the war with reality, whenever we are totally present and undivided, we are immediately in union with our true nature…. You are everything you ever wanted.  I write this to myself as a reminder as much as to you, dear reader.” 

I love the idea of our whole diverse and divided country uniting in the pursuit of self-inquiry through yoga and discovering they have everything they need inside them already to live the lives they desire. 

If you haven’t seen the movie Kumare, I’d recommend it.  It’s a documentary about a man who searches for a guru in India to guide the development of his spiritual life.  He becomes disillusioned by the “gurus” he meets and decides to make a documentary about affecting spiritual growth in a group of people by becoming a false spiritual teacher.  He really does a great job of convincing people he’s the one to follow and many people begin to look to him for guidance.  He pays close attention to his followers, listens intently, and when they ask him for guidance, he skillfully puts the question right back on them. 

As Kumare builds up this community where he is the “guru”, he builds up the confidence in each of his students and strongly makes his point about the power of self-transformation.  Many of the students really start changing their lives for the better even though they are following someone who is literally making shit up as he goes along.   I won’t spoil the ending, but this social experiment really brings the point home about having everything we need to make the changes we want to see in our lives.    

Apparently Kumare’s followers and I are not the only ones who want to change.  According to the latest Yoga in America study produced by Yoga Journal Magazine, the number of yoga practitioners has increased by 30 percent in the past four years. Their 2008 survey accounted for 15.8 million yoga practitioners, but the latest figure shows that 20.4 million Americans are now practicing — about 8.7 percent of U.S. adults.

So here’s my little shout out for “Krista’s Guru Nation”.  It’s about my life and my yoga journey and my rise with the tide of so many other Americans looking for ways to improve our lives. Yoga offers me access to an effective and alternate life philosophy and gives an alternate way of thinking and being in the world.  Perhaps like me, other people feel sickened  (yes, literally ill) or merely disillusioned by mainstream American culture.  I have learned through my inquiry that I need:   

·         Substance over appearances

·         Sustainability over material over-consumption

·         Sharing over greed

·         Spaciousness and reflection over busy-ness and over-scheduling

·         Collaboration over zero-sum competition

·         Kindness and understanding over efficiency and marketing, and  

·         Meaningful, lasting connections over shallow, sensational “bucket list” experiences

Does this sound like you?  If you’ve landed here and found you’d like to become more skillful, more authentic, more “You”, then I look forward to walking this path with you. 

Dr. Kelly Flanagan, in his blog Untangled sums it up perfectly when he says, “I’m not here to prove myself.  I’m here to be myself…. the great calling upon your life is to find your way into the center of your heart, where the story is simply about being yourself—loving what you love, and living what you are here to live.” 

No guru required. 

Tapping into that New Year "Newness"

Ahh, it feels great to get a new year- a clean slate- a chance to hit that reset button on 2016. 

I survived the holidays with my family, which is no small feat. The new year feels like the calm after an emotional whirlwind whipping up the past, old patterns of interaction, and new sources pain with the joy and celebration of the occasion. But there were other more positive aspects of 2016 to reflect on.  I did meet some personal goals by deepening the craft of instructing yoga and my own practice.

In 2016, I started a course led by Christopher Wallis, author and Tantric scholar on Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. Wallis says that the very "first three Sutras are the essence of the whole text".  This first chapter gives advice on how to connect with one's inner most self and to me, the first three Sutras feels like a great way to start the new year.

Yoga Sutra 1.1:  "Now begins the inquiry" or "Now is taught yoga-the method that lets us see things as they really are." 

Wallis says that we do this by practicing awareness of reality without filtering everything through the our mind and thoughts and judgements.  We practice seeing reality with "the beginner's mind" or as things are without the mind's preconceived notions or patterns of thought.  

But do we really want to see reality? This will not always feel good because reality can be painful and awkward.  But Wallis says that this pain can bring an intimacy with reality. This truth and honesty with ourselves can bring us a deep sense of joy- a deep sense of true joy rather than the fleeting act of feeling better in the moment which is not necessarily yoga.

So what do i mean by "yoga"?  I will use Wallis's definition:

Yoga Sutra 1.2: "Yoga is the result of the process in which the mind becomes still- where thoughts and emotional fluctuations subside."  Wallis says this stillness is the key because when our minds are still, we can be aware of the parts inside of us that remain unchanged since our first memories in childhood; our fundamental selves.  When we turn off all the noise, we reside in our true nature, a state of profound inner stillness. 

And why would we want to reside in this stillness?  Wallis continues by noting the benefit of experiencing this profound state of inner stillness is that it grounds us.  "This grounding stillness helps us avoid overwhelm and despair.  Fullness of heart, presence and love are only available to those who know their true selves."  This leads us to Wallis's interpretation of Sutra 1.3...

Yoga Sutra 1.3:  " When yoga happens, then we, the perceiver, can abide in our own true nature."

Wallis notes that's one's true nature is not just another experience-not like the temporary and ever-changing states of the mind. When we become one with our center, we connect with the serenity and quiet joy that are naturally a part of our true nature.

Now doesn't that sound like a great way to start the new year? 

Try Christopher Wallis's three minute practice for connecting with one's true nature:

1.  In a comfortable seat, relax the body.  Start with the top of the head and work your way down the face, neck, body cavity, organs, arms, hands hips, legs and feet. (One minute)

2.  Focus the attention deeply within the heart space- at the back and base of the heart.  Keep focusing all attention in the heart space noticing how this feels.  If the attention drifts back to the head and mind, gently bring it back to the heart.  (Two minutes)

3.  Feel into the essence of your core, unfiltered by the fluctuating mind and deep in the body.

Namaste and a truly joyful new year to you all.

Krista

The meaning of Namaste by Jeffrey Armstrong

I like listening to the Sivana Podcast with Ashton Szabo when I'm folding laundry, driving kids to football practice or waiting for the odd middle school surf PE pick up.  He recently interviewed the spiritual teacher, poet, author and speaker Jeffrey Armstrong.  The took on the HUGE title of "How Yoga Can Change the World".  Wow.  That's a big bite at the apple. 

Because of the lofty goals of the episode, Ashton asked the esteemed Mr. Armstrong to break down one simple way for all us yogis and yoginis to make a small change in the world.  Armstrong chose to focus on the word "Namaste". 

He said the word had three parts.  "Na" meaning Not, "mas" meaning me, and "te" meaning you.  Translated as "not me, but you".  He notes that namaste is not a philosophy, but rather a way of looking at someone else.  When you speak it to someone else, like in greeting or at the end of a yoga class, Armstrong asks that we see things a little differently than we normally do.  Namaste requires way more than the mere acknowledgement of that other person'spresence or body or appearance or opinions or thoughts. It says that the speaker of Namaste must see the consciousness of that/those people.   What is the consciousness?  More simply put, he said, "You must see the driver (that person who sits inside) and not the car (the exterior)."

So one way to use yoga to change the world comes down to how we look at one another.  It's a shift in perspective.  Mr. Armstrong asked us to see that inner light that unites us all instead of the exterior of the car.  He asks u sto "see every being as a divine traveler on a journey of being." 

So you look at your child sleeping and see the divine.  Simple enough.  But what about that driver who just cut you off on the way to work, or that Trump supporter or NRA member, chain smoker, commercially raised meat-eater, gas-guzzling SUV driver, person whose dog poops in your yard ever day, etc..?  Can you see that "driver"? Armstrong asks us to remember that we are all divine beings, even though some of the ideas we may have are wrong. He says that even though there are right and wrong choices for our world, that every divine being is in a different grade in school.  "You wouldn't date a sixth grader if you were in high school!" he quipped.  We are all in "different grades".

Yoga asks us to consider the divine connection all living beings have on this planet.  And when we see one another, we need to see more than the exterior of "the car". Armstrong finished his interview with Ashton by noting the urgency with which we need to do this for the sake of our world.  He concluded that this small shift in perspective could be a good start on the way to"holding the world together instead of living towards destruction." 

 So Namaste. I see you and I hear you, Mr. Armstrong.  We are all in this thing called life together.