Yesterday, I got a tip on how to get men to come to yoga class: Have a couples’ class. (Thank you Jane Trump) The thought took root and began to grow, and this morning the flower bloomed. We can have a Relationship Yoga class.
As you who have been taking our classes have discovered, yoga is not just just an exercise routine to make your body feel better. It is a practice to make your mind feel better. Yoga’s secret is that it reaches the mind through the body and breath, a backdoor strategy that really works. In class we have been learning how to apply the practice of yoga to the mind as it encounters the demands of the everyday world.
There is no better place in the world to practice yoga then in a relationship. Yoga is not a path that requires you to retreat from the world, but to engage the world and transcend it through silent awareness of what is. Therefore, in the context of yoga, the purpose of relationships, including marriage, is to provide the opportunities to transcend ones conditioned limitations, or what I call, mental postures. As Clint Eastwood said in the Unforgiven: “One must know his limitations.”
Relationship Yoga is learning how to become aware of our mental postures in relationship—not judge them but just notice them. In yoga there is no right or wrong posture, there is only a posture. We discover that by just becoming silently aware of our mental postures, we are released from them. Just as one shifts attention from thinking to the silence of the body while doing a yoga asana, one can learn to shift attention from the “other thing or person” who is irritating us to our reactive posture. This is a shift in intention from the “problem” (the external world) to the internal “posture,” which is actually creating the “problem.” Instead of treating symptoms, we learn to remove the cause. Yoga helps us transform problems into situations and solutions. A problem, as we all know who are married, is a stuck situation that reruns the same feelings while playing in different locations.
So I am looking for four couples who would like to try Relationship Yoga. As for myself, I know it works, as my own marriage has been my classroom. My wife and I have been divorced and remarried to each other, and when I look back over the years we have been together, there have been so many postures discovered and released.
Now, when a posture appears and the possibility for stress in the marriage rises, it quickly dissolves and is replaced by laughter. Our relationship has become a dance where each is sensitive to the other’s movements and quickly follows in step. What has become important for us is not who is leading but the dance.
Relationship with my wife has freed me from myself. I remember when I first met her, I took dancing lessons from a Fred Astaire studio, and I have been learning to dance every since. Recently, I bought a set of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance movies. “That is what we are doing!” I thought, dancing with life. When life moves, we follow. We learn how to let go, feeling the music and shifting our attention from separation to oneness with the music.
Here is the outline of Relationship Yoga. The class will have an easy stretching/squeezing asanas to release the toxins of stress held in the muscles, then deep relaxation and deep breathing to expel the toxins from the body and totally free the the mind from its postures. Each class will include mediation techniques, which will be things to do during the week where the “dance lessons” can be practiced in real life.
Here is the great secret I have learned by dancing with my wife. As I learn to dance with her like Fred Astaire, she becomes my Ginger. But the dance does not end there.
I am also learning how to dance with the present moment. Wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, there is music, movement, surrender, and joy.
So I invite you to join me in this dance. The music is divine and the steps are easy to learn. Will four couples come out on this floor? The 6-week class will be start Wed. Nov. 15 at 7:30.
Om Peace
Ed
http://www.awarenessforall.com
http://www.blackstoneyogacenter.com/
Posted under General Observations
This post was written by ed on October 28, 2006
