I admit it. For a while now, I haven’t been excited about doing my yoga practice (or going to yoga classes). So, in front of you all, I’m outing myself….
I don’t want to do yoga anymore. (Audience gasps in horror. Rotten tomatoes are thrown. Mayhem ensues)
I know… I know. We’re all told by confident, wise looking people that yoga is supposed to be the answer to all our problems. But for me, it’s become more of a chore than an interest. And it’s strange, but in saying that, I feel as if I’m in some way “defecting” from the yoga/peace/ cool/nouveau-hippy movement that’s been oh-so-popular for what…25 years? And I can already begin to hear the yoga-apologist critics in my head ….
- You’re just getting too old, Dave. That’s all.
- You weren’t really ever part of the club, anyway.
- It’s obvious to us all that you just never got it. If you really got it, you’d never leave us.
- You’re simply not disciplined enough.
Well, maybe I am getting old. Maybe I’ve gotten one too many yoga injuries. Maybe I was just never cut out to be a long haired, cool yogi with 1% body fat and a string of wooden Mala beads around my neck. It’s true: I didn’t go to classes religiously. Somehow, there were often, other, more interesting, ways to pass my time. Maybe there’s always been some part of me that resented the yoga studio because it made me feel out-of-shape, innately spiritually lacking and inherently flawed.
But regardless of what the reasons are, traditional (or Hatha) yoga and I are breaking up.
Now I want to be clear. This does not mean that I think yoga is “bad” or “wrong” in any way. On the contrary, I think yoga is a beautiful endeavor. At it’s core, it’s about understanding and developing our consciousness. And for those of you that know me, you’ll know I’m always looking at new ways of exploring consciousness. (I’m planning on doing a darkness retreat in Thailand next year, but that’s another story for another time.) I’m just saying that regular yoga and I are agreeing to disagree and parting ways, as friends.
So here’s something a little weird. Having just said all that about yoga, you can imagine how surprised I was when I stumbled upon a new type of yoga and found myself strangely excited about it! It’s different. And it’s not like the yoga that I’ve done in the past. It’s called Kaiut yoga (or just Kaiut for short) and was developed by a Brazilian man named Francisco Kaiut who, in my opinion, is really smart. It’s nothing like what we think of when we think of “yoga”.
Looking at Kaiut from the outside, it looks really uninteresting – even boring. It doesn’t consist of all the flowing movements and yoga poses that I pushed through in the past – all those deep muscle and ligament stretches that have led to pulled muscles and deep seeded frustration. In fact, Kaiut yoga seems only remotely related to yoga.
It is a very passive, but very precise, sequence of movements that allows the body to relax into stretches for long moments. And all the work, all the interesting stuff, for me, happens in the mind, in consciousness.
In my last article, I talked about the “trembling” and Eric Goodman saying, “That little tremble is what’s making all the changes we want to make here.”? In Kaiut, we’re faced with this “trembling” for moments that feel like an eternity.
In a good, slow, gentle way, Kaiut positions bring up discomfort - not pain - but discomfort, so much so, that sometimes I begin to feel an emotional build up and find myself fantasizing about either unzipping my skin so I can crawl out of my body, or beating the yoga mat with my fists and crying from sheer irritation and annoyance. Trembling? I think so too.
Staying in specific, passive poses for a prolonged time allows us to relax into positions without the efforting of other traditional yogas. This passivity allows the joints to open in ways they haven’t been able to for weeks, months, and in some cases, years. But for those long minutes that I’m relaxing into a deep stretch, or tightening my quad through a cramp, it can feel emotionally torturous.
I know I’m making this sound a bit horrendous but it actually isn’t. It just simply brings up deep-seated resistance. To give this sort of resistance and discomfort permission to be there, without running away from it, is what is so exciting to me about Kaiut. Once I do that - once I don’t fight the discomfort anymore, the poses have a mysteriously comforting effect on my nervous system. To not move toward discomfort or away from it, but rather, just give it room, takes an unusual but very rewarding focus. I find that, in some strange way, it is deeply healing… and I’ve become even a little addicted to it.
But my interest in Kaiut makes sense to me. It’s right in line with a theme that’s been coming up over and over for me recently. So often we are running away from our feelings. Example: We feel angry so we eat. We feel tired, so we drink caffeine. We feel powerless or upset or scared, so we blame someone for making us feel that way. What would happen if we just felt the feeling so deeply and allowed it to be there?
The idea of giving a sensation, a thought, or an emotion, permission to be there without needing to change it, get rid of it or do anything about it…is where the magic is.
When we give discomfort inside permission to be there for long enough, with patience, courage and grace – it transforms itself. It ceases to be so uncomfortable. The intensity of the feeling lessens and becomes tolerable. It becomes ok in a strange way, even healing.
So I encourage you to experiment with discomfort - any sort of discomfort you choose. See if you can count to ten during the sensations, whether they are physical, emotional or mental. See if you can simply breathe through the sensation of discomfort without trying to fix it, without running away from it, and just give it permission to be there. I will bet that, with practice, you will see that you will be able to count to twenty or thirty after a while. Or you may even cease to find discomfort in what seemed so difficult in the beginning.
Try it and let me know what you discover.
I hope this was helpful.
Dave
PSIf you’re interested, here’s the link to Francisco Kaiut’s website