YOGA FESTIVAL TORONTO – Day One, My Rough Notes.

Currents of Grace with Barrie Risman: Morning Class
Started class with an emotional environmental scan. Asking people to say one word about where they are emotionally. (People said things like, joyful, happy, I said reluctant…)
There is an ever present under current of grace. In tantra we aknowedge one source of energy that creates manifestaion. There are two facets to it:

1) It is constantly manifesting
2) It remains present in its fullness (shiva).

To be in touch, dive down beneath the waves and into this subterrainian current.
Internal rotation as the gateway to outre external rotation- like doing an opposite action to get to the expressive place
We as human beings are embodied spirits- What is more paradoxical than that?
In pigeon position be like a two way street, paradox, opposing force.
Fan the flames of the strain in your muscles with the breath.
Use your body to be in service of the greater consciousness.

Break- Ascent Magazine September 2003
“In mothering the motto is not practice makes perfect but perhaps simply practice makes practice”
“Filling the God shaped hole”
Stephanie Wilkinson.

Afternoon Class- Mantras with Marla Joy from Swaha:

We can use and understand the meter of the vedic language. Peace is our true nature, yoga practice brings us closer to this, quells the suffering.

The self asks that you take the divine knowing, your consciousness and acknowledge that you are worthy of it, accept it in, radiate it out. Don’t let doubt move in, this spirit is accessible to you.

We have 5 bodies

1. The Gross Physical Body or Audarik Sharir -
2. The subtle Transformation Body or Vaikriya Sharir -
3. The Translocation body or Aharak Sharir -
4. The Fiery Body or Taijas Sharir -
5. The Karma Body or Karman Sharir -

AND there are disembodied spirits around us everywhere.

Afternoon, Second Session- Micheal Stone. Yoga and Buddhism.

The essence of Buddha’s teaching is in yoga. He was himself a yogi. The term Buddhism was made by European scholars trying to describe the teachings of the Buddha.

Gnostic sense of an inner spark.

Theme of inquiry, theme of questioning is at the heart of yoga practice.
When the Buddha left his palace on his quest he saw three things

1) a sick person
2) a dying person
3) an aging person.

He asked “will this happen to me?”

Everything you look at is impermanent. Everything you feel is impermanent. Highly provisional. All the skhandhas.

Feelings thoughts, all referring back to me. I am the reference point, but I change. We keep tying to study the nature of reality without a prefabricated belief system. We use linguistic strategies.

Pleasure is the fish hook. You feel pleasure and you want more. You are hooked. We use the mind to superimpose onto reality that there is a “me”

There is always change in the body, it is its nature. Mindfulness is noticing the breathe as it is and meditating on it.

Symbol manipulation place, this is language. We confuse the names of things with how things really are.

The intensity of our questions are directly related to the impact of the answers. Go into the changing flow of reality.

Dukkha happens when you try to create a permanence in an impermanent world. We believe our stories about reality to create permanence.

The Buddha teaches us that nothing is hidden, “god” is here everywhere. Not under things. Not hiding so you need to go find her/him/it. Everything is inherently without self.

When the heart is open, there is nothing to say. That’s mula bhanda. It eats up grammer. You see a sunset, and bam- mula bundha.

Nama-rupa= Name + Form. The mind labels it sunset. then as soon as its labelled you become separate from it. “Emptiness of self image, emptiness of self form”

When you start noticing the breath you change it. If we can’t even leave our breath alone how can we expect to have relationships!!!?

When you think so much about Yoga Gossip- Yoga Journal, magazines, books- you end up falling into this place of superimposing external geomotry on this body.

You create this anthology of me, chapter after chapter. How will yoga help you when you die? Are you focused on the external geomotry of this practice or the internal form? The phisiology of the body and the psychology of the body intertwined.

After you get through the honeymoon period of your relationship with yoga, you start to think it isn’t working. You might feel pain. You are tapping into deep and ancient emotions, patterns of conditioned behaviours and patterns years and years of it- lifetimes of it- You end up feeling this in a thouroughly embodied way.

Your internal alignment is clogged up with capitalist patriarchial knots. (nadi- little river)

Your experience doesn’t flow through the channels of your chakras because they are clogged up and distracted with preferences.

In Modern Yoga asana is being reduced to some health system. If you practice true yoga with a focus on internal alignment, it will ruin your life.(in jest he continued) Your world will become inflexible. You won’t be able to travel because you will become vegan, you won’t go our anymore with your friends because you will become enraptured with your breath- “I can’t go out tonight with you guys, sorry, I have to say home and be with my breath”

The problem is that your ego highjacks the spiritual practice. “spitirual advancement” starts to become crystals on the chandelier of your ego.

“patterns of emotional reactivity”

You don’t TRY to be compassionate. You don’t try to be honest. you ARE compassion. you ARE honesty.

8 Limbs- Relationship between letting go of conceit “i am” and ahisma expression of enlightenment, expression of intimacy

Deep into the body beyond the play of opposites the body and the universe are indivisable.

Body is 80% water. You are the same as the don river. It flows back to you. Flush the toilet. It’s the don river, and the don river is you.

What are the basic questions that got you on your path?

If there isn’t any attachment on who I need to be for you, I am not clinging to my habit energies, I am free.It’s sometimes very hard being around people who are being who they are totally and honestly. It isn’t always pretty. Relationship means non attachment.

Yoga doesn’t get passed down through books, magazines, it gets passed down through you. Through people. Moment to moment in real time, real life. these days in the health system practices of yoga it can be very anonymous, this is not traditionally the path of yoga. It is about community. Pedagogy used to take place chest to chest in the vedic tradition.

We need to engender community and strengthen these bonds again, recover intimate connection to teaching.

Round Table Discussion- Yoga’s Past

As people we contain the past (your mom) the present (yourself) and the future (capacity to create babies) all of humanity is living within a lineage.

There is sometimes a tension between tradition and personal experience wondering of where the weight is. It helps to start from the standpoint of knowing the namas and then showing creativity.

Esoteric vs Exoteric- we share a virtual cathedrial. The esoteric is a deep kind of knowing, even in yoga classes we might be slipping into the exoteric.

Three important things to remember as a yoga teacher.

1) Have a good solid personal practice
2) have a good teacher yourself
3) Care about people.

——————————————————
The Above Notes are From The Below Curriculum.

Friday 22nd
7:00am Kim Schwartz: Developing the Observer Consciousness:
The Yoga system proposes the most refined understanding of an ancient Vedic truth: that there is always and eternally an expansive and unlimited awareness that rests unseen beneath the temporary movements of the mind and the slingsand arrows of outrageous fortune. Named by many names through the ages, this seer, ground-of-being, watcher, or witness rests within. To spend a meditative hour experiencing the flow of life from its perspective is an ideal way to begin the day, and this festival.

8:15-11:15am- Barrie Risman Anusara: Yoga invites us to step into the ever-present flow of Grace in our practice and in our lives. When we align with the highest in ourselves, the yoga practice becomes a transformative and joyful expression of this expansive inner feeling. In this session, we’ll learn the elegant and concise set of Universal Principles of Alignment as the framework for skillfully attuning ourselves on all levels with the magnificence of Spirit

VEGAN LUNCH

1:00 – 3:00pm, Marla Joy- Essential Mantras For Sadhana: Meanings, pronunciation, and practice of Gananam Tva, Gayatri, Mahamrtyunjaya, and Brahmarparnam, plus others, taught and led by the lead chant-euse of SWAHA.

4:30-6:00pm Micheal Stone- Yoga and Buddhism: There is a common misperception that Yoga explores the body and Buddhism teaches us about the mind. In this lecture and discussion, Michael will explore the influence of yoga and Buddhism on one another and tease out the ways each tradition offers practices designed to work with both mind and body. Drawing on his forthcoming book on Yoga & Buddhism, Michael will offer some discussion about the yoga practices the Buddha engaged in before his enlightenment and the ways the early Buddhist teachings influenced key movements in yoga philosophy and psychology.

VEGAN DINNER

6:00-9:30pm Roundtable: Yoga — Past to Present
Join eight of our esteemed faculty in a moderated roundtable discussion of how we make sense of Yoga’s history. Who are our gurus? How do we connect with them over millenia, intense societal and technological distances, through ancient languages and cultures of ‘otherness’? Do we sometimes feel we’ll practicing in a tradition that has outgrown its golden age? The last 20 minutes will be open to questions from the floor.