ANDY THOMAS | DELAMAY PATRICK | JOHN MACEVOY | DAWN ARNO
Yoga for All School Children in India by the end of 2009: IYN Members Comment
India’s Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss said recently that he wants all school-going
children to learn Yoga in the hope that it can reduce diseases such as diabetes and
hypertension in the future. “I am going to make Yoga mandatory for all school-going
children in India in 2009. There should be extensive scientific deliberations on
Yoga. And today I blatantly put that Yoga reduces diabetes, Yoga reduces hypertension,
Yoga reduces stress," Anbumani Ramadoss recently stated at a regional conference.
When asked to comment on this Jeremy Jones, the head of The Yoga College said, “I'm
all in favour of starting Yoga young but the element of compulsion rings alarm bells. That's
not what Yoga's about. In a few years time, I predict that young Indians will give
up Yoga in droves as soon as they leave school - and where are they going to find
all the teachers of the right calibre? Think it through, Minister!”
Cathy Sullivan was of a like mind: “A shame that it's compulsory - this particular
statement sounds like an imposition. It's great that children would get the opportunity
to do Yoga - but their experiences of it will depend on the teachers they get! The
children would get more out of the Yoga if they chose to do it - perhaps after having
some initial opportunities to participate and find out what's involved (so they can
make an informed choice!) I wonder about the type of Yoga offered to the children
and the style of teaching - could be very off-putting for children if the style is
inappropriate.”
By contrast, Fenella Lindsell, Director and Co-Founder of YogaBugs Ltd supports India’s
Health Minister completely. Fenella commented: “Yoga for children underpins all
the targets identified by Every Child Matters which are:
Be healthy through regular beneficial non competitive exercise;
Stay safe by taking part in an activity with a teacher who is correctly insured, police checked and well qualified to teach children;
Enjoy and achieve by discovering the postures suitable to each age group. (YogaBugs go on exciting story style adventures whilst children doing Yoga’d Up follow fun themed classes which encourage them to be creative and work together);
Make a positive contribution by taking part, sharing ideas and experiences. Through
Yoga, children can enjoy a cross curricular activity which brings learning alive
in a story form, helping children understand for example more about anti-bullying.
(Yoga’d Up kids could enjoy fun partner work postures which help to teach them respect
and trust);
Achieve economic well-being by helping children to enjoy Yoga and feel more confident
and happy in their lives.
Yoga also meets the goals of Inclusion, by ensuring that every child has the opportunity to benefit physically, mentally and emotionally from the holistic approach that Yoga brings to their lives. Every child will gain from Yoga whether they are flexible, stiff, challenged by additional needs, sporty or looking for an activity to make them feel more confident and balanced in their lives.”
Sarah Swindlehurst (owner of yogakidz) was keen for Yoga to be a part of school life,
but under the right conditions: “I am in full support of introducing yoga into all
the school so long as the teachers teaching it are qualified yoga teachers. Firstly,
I do believe that the classes should be informative and educational with the well-being
of the children given top priority. Secondly, children’s Yoga classes should be therapeutic
and fun for the children so not to put them off pursuing yoga after school and when
they leave school. Yoga is superbly beneficial for children and starting at a young
age is perfect as children are naturally flexible. Yoga will also aid them in their
growth as an individual emotionally, mentally and spiritually. It will help them
in many ways to cope with today’s social pressures and assist them in maintaining
balance in life. When yoga is in the schools I do hope that the discipline is toned
down so that the children do not see it as a ‘normal’, compulsory lesson but that
they see it more as a self-discovery where there is no marking scheme and no pressure.
Yoga before school starts can, in my experience, be a wonderful way to start the
day, setting the children up for the rest of the day’s activities. It stretches
their bodies gently, and also wakens their minds in a non-aggressive way (unlike
an alarm clock!) Yoga is a natural start to the day for everyone to enjoy.”
Pete Yates had this to say: “Minister Ramadoss might well have trouble realising
his ambition. When a similar ruling making Yoga compulsory in schools was passed
in Uttar Pradesh not long ago, Muslim groups in the state not only took to the streets,
but had the ruling reversed at the High Court. This prompted counter-demonstrations
from the Hindu majority. Yoga seems to generate such skirmishes and we’ve had them
in the UK too, particularly when Yoga has been introduced in schools and its imagined
impact on faith traditions has alarmed those with a psychological investment in them.
To my mind, fundamentalists of every persuasion should be suspicious of the essence
of Yoga since it reveals to us the purely contingent nature of our collective and
individual identities. ”
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Consciousness—Curse or Blessing? By Andrew Thomas
Someone who is happy with his or her own analysis of life has probably moved from a ‘lower’ to a ‘higher’ state of consciousness. This movement starts off being a painful curse and only later becomes a blessing.
The curse of consciousness comes when one first begins to ask certain obvious and punishing questions such as, “How is it that everyone does not see how awful war is?” or, “ Am I the only one seeing the need to feed the starving before making more bombs?”
When the realisation dawns that low levels of consciousness are endemic to humanity, most especially amongst Western capitalists, then the person emerging into higher consciousness has to reconcile to a life of knowing that he or she is always going to be outside the main stream.
With Yoga practice, one’s level of consciousness regularly increases until one is able to be content with the outsider role. Then, as the Zen masters have pointed out so many times, “When you know how the world works, then there is no other worthy action but to help the sick and distressed.”
Once one has come to this realisation, one is simply led to all those aspects of consciousness that have the character of blessings: it is as though the seeker were led through a forest into a beautiful place which until then was hidden from view.
Then consciousness feels joyful and one cannot be knocked from this position by external forces no matter what they are.
This, in my view, is how consciousness is turned into a blessing — but it seems as if the choice is not left to the individual as to who is selected, if this is the right word to use, to become conscious. There is definitely no pattern discernible from an examination of the person’s income or occupation or place of birth or religion — at least I have not so far found a pattern.
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Permission to Exhale by Delamay Patrick
It’s wonderful to go to a yoga class and have a teacher tell you to relax and exhale
deeply. I love that flash of stillness, the moment of clarity when you’re given permission
to exhale. In a fast-
The breath is the most vital process of the body. It influences the activities of each and every cell and most importantly, is intimately linked with the performance of the brain and to all aspects of the human experience. Rhythmic, deep and slow respiration stimulates a calm and content state of mind. Irregular breathing disrupts the rhythms of the brain and leads to physical, emotional and mental blocks. These in turn can lead to inner conflict.
The body is intelligent, the body is part of nature and we are part of the body. We are of course more than the mind and the body, we are pure consciousness, but the body is the gateway. Humans are not machines we are an organic unity. When we get sick it is a sign that they body is going through some difficulties and the symptom is the weakest part. We often treat the symptom but not the cause. The body and mind support each other and the more we respect our bodies the longer it will serve us.
The body gives us a way to communicate with the rest of existence. When we are in harmony with our body we are in harmony with nature. To be yourself and to listen to your own body allows us to listen to our own heart and then we can listen to what we want out of life and what we want right NOW.
Recently I was in California, the energy before the election was very tense, as if everyone was holding their breath, but when the votes were counted and the result announced the energy shifted as if the whole country exhaled in a huge sigh of relief.
With the winter upon us it is time to go internal by slowing down, sleeping more and perhaps reflecting on the past year. By doing so we are exhaling fully, enabling stress levels to reduce and being grateful for our families, friends and who we are. So during this time of year don’t forget to take a moment to give yourself permission to exhale!
TOP | ANDY THOMAS | DELAMAY PATRICK | DAWN ARNO
Why Cats Don’t Do Yoga By John (Mac) Evoy
This article is dedicated, as always, to my teacher Godfrey Devereux, without whom, no doubt, there would be a cat in every yoga shala.
The famous double slit experiment, at the heart of quantum physics, demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt something fundamental about the universe. Put very briefly, a single photon, a particle of light, fired at a screen with two slits in it, passes through both of them. When a detector is placed on one of the slits, the photon passes through just one slit. The conclusion, a particle can be anywhere, at any time, until it is measured. Then you know the thing you measured, though everything else about it remains uncertain.
The great physicist Richard Feynman once speculated there might only be a single particle, weaving the whole fabric of the universe on the loom of space and time. However that may be, Feynman also famously remarked that anyone who is not amazed by quantum physics hasn’t understood it. The double slit experiment, he said, ‘contains the only mystery.’
Indeed the world is amazing and mysterious, a flower, a new born baby’s eyes, a lover’s kiss, but the peculiar perplexity aroused by quantum mechanics comes because we are locked into history/herstory. Stories are fundamental to being human.
If we surround the beast and all throw together then we will eat it, not it eat us.
If you dig under that tree when the fourth moon is full and cook the root until it
smells so, then it is good to eat. If you go down to the corner shop before 10 o-
So poor naked, defenseless humanity relies for its very existence upon the agreed story. Upon so many stories, overlapping, interwoven, creating an apparent fabric in which to survive and buy insurance against any unwonted unraveling of the tale. Of course, the hand writes on and as it does, traveling across the page, so events unfold, things happen, one after another and, without even thinking, we see the arrow of time moving past, from left to right. Time passes. Time passed, and then…..
Well no, it didn’t! The last thing time does is pass. There is nothing for it to
pass by. Language betrays the story. If time passed you by, you would have to exist
outside it. Beyond the odd, stoned hippy, lost on the beaches of Goa or Ibiza, this
is unlikely. The arrow of time comes straight towards you. What is more, being two-
But, you protest, I exist. I remember when…. etc, etc. More stories. We construct also the stories of our apparent lives, hoping and fearing for our supposed futures. We imagine ourselves to be these characters in the story. It is all, though, just a story, constructed by the amazing human cortex, a symbolic model of something in which to wrap our fragile egos, a model fundamentally undone by looking deeply into the nature of the universe via the double slit experiment. Where it is revealed that everything is possible now, and resolved now.
The efforts of the human cortex to resolve its difficulties on its own terms are, strikingly, both elaborate and unsuccessful. They appear to include the whole of String Theory, for example. Countless mathematicians and theoretical physicists no doubt, sit with furrowed brows, clenched jaws and knitted legs, desperately seeking the golden solution, when all they need to do is to relax and breathe.
Quite when people started doing yoga is really not known. One can imagine the practice began when conflicts between people started to become serious, the world less magical, beginning to fill up with other humans, opposed and forced migrations, nomads attacking settlers, the very old stories. Certainly the oldest spiritual scripts seem to have arisen out of a need to find peace and meaning in a world of chaotic conflict.
Whatever, people need yoga because they think. “Yoga citta vritti nirodha” says Patanjali. Yoga is to let go the chatter of the mind. Of course, the mind will chatter and any attempt to stop it is unnatural, a bullet, perhaps, a very hard blow, a whole bottle of whiskey. We need the mind and its abilities to survive. It’s insistence on priority, however, denies us peace and true happiness.
The perspective of time changed, and the stories of our lives taken a little more lightly, we can see ourselves as, not a few decades old, but as a pattern arising back through, as it were, the arrow of time. A pattern as old as the universe, constructed out of particles created in the Big Bang, through millions of evolutionary forms, into now. Looked at in this dimension the human cortex is a very flashy, new thing. We are so easily bewitched by its abilities. That there is another view, much older, much deeper, is simply confirmed by quantum experiment.
Yoga teaches us to move and breath as one. It provides, surprisingly rapidly if taught effectively, a direct experience of suspending the measuring instruments of the senses, pratyahara, the fifth limb of asta anga, or eight limbed, yoga. It does this through teaching internal focus, initially softening and broadening parts of the body while inhaling and lengthening while exhaling. As sensitivity and focus improve this process becomes more subtle so that all of the body softens, broadens and lengthens together, so that breath, body and awareness come together.
Samapatti is the exquisite Sanskrit word, meaning, perhaps, to coincide. As measurement by the senses is suspended, so the infinite possibility inherent in now becomes clearer and life resolves in endless playfulness with each exhalation.
What’s going to happen next? Wow, just look at that!
And, why is it cats don’t do yoga? Well you could argue they don’t need to think symbolically, instead reacting instinctively to the moment. The truth is, what we perceive as a cat is also just part of the story. In reality, they’re all locked up in Shrodinger’s Box, not knowing if they’re alive or dead.
mac@elementalyoga.co.uk
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Meditation by Dawn Arno
Many of our students assume that as Yoga teachers we are conversant with all aspects of meditation, that becoming a yogi sits hand in hand with a diligent and serious meditation practise. That presumption is not unlike the belief that to meditate one must sit bound in the lotus position, empty the mind of all thought and become terribly serious and austere. Of course we know this not to be the case.
Over my years of practise I have been drawn to meditation both on and off my mat. In my youth sitting in meditation would have been torture for me – it was hard enough just to hold a posture for any length of time. The fire in my belly wanted me to move, run, leap and dance. Trapped in my physical body or in annamaya kosha, a powerful physical practise was most appealing to me.
In those early years I would have said my meditation happened when focus was turned inward during asana practise. In fact that was probably the only time my mind was completely still.
I first became aware of the deep stillness and clarity which can occur during savasana. I now know this to be a glimpse into the state of bliss or connectedness with the soul, my anandamaya kosha. I began to look forward more and more to spending time on the mat. Slowly I found it was not always necessary to be doing something with my body to bring my mind into sharp focus. That it was possible to go inward through the five sheaths of existence and into the centre of my being.
When the five koshas or sheaths of being are misaligned one being more dominant than the other we suffer from disease or disharmony within self. This manifests in many different ways. Health, relationships, poor emotional states, even wealth can suffer.
So often we or our students simply exist in the physical state, anandamaya kosha and there is no dialogue, understanding or communication between these sheaths.
The beauty of our practise is that what happens on our mat is simply a mirror of what is manifest in our lives. Therefore through our asana, pranayama and our meditation practise we can bring our koshas into balance then this will be positively reflected in our material existence. Improved health, relationships even our ability to manifest the kind of life we wish to live.
So how do we get in touch with our internal being, our soul, our blissful state?
By switching off the internal dialogue of the mind and allowing ourselves the time and space to look inwards.
But how is this done?
There are many methods which work but here is a method that has worked for me and my students.
Introduce a few minutes of stillness sitting on the mat before you begin asanas. This
grounding brings you to a place of deep pratyahara -
If necessary turn your attention to watching your breath, perhaps deepening it in preparation for asana.
I tried this with my students in class and was astounded at the results. Their own practise seemed more powerful, intense, authentic. They spent less time examining the postures of the other students and seemed to find it easier to turn inwards.
This simple yet powerful discovery led me to intensify my own personal meditation. I
would give myself time each day to just be still, to look inward rather than explore
the internal dialogue. I learnt simple techniques which would allow me to become
non-
At first this was immensely difficult. But having seen the results on the mat with my students I persevered. If by being still for five minutes watching the breath the following asana practise can be so much more focused and intense then how would a daily meditation practise change my own interactions with the world. Would I learn to stop the internal chatter? How would my relationships change, my own Yoga asanas, my emotional health?
The practise began really with my own pranayama. I went right back to basics and began to follow the complete yoga breath. I later learnt that this simple practise which had grounded myself and my students so effectively was utilized in Buddhist Meditation as Mindfulness of the Breath. This wonderful practise is the most basic and yet most powerful of all meditations. Even now after years of meditation and teaching this is the practise I teach first, second and last. There are so many layers of awareness which can be uncovered, developed and utilised that no matter what kind of student you have in front of you. This simple meditation holds the key to a state of bliss.
How it works:
Find a place to sit comfortably. Make sure your spine is fully supported and that you feel relaxed. Place the hands palms up on the knees.
Perhaps decide how long you wish to meditate and set an alarm so you don’t have to wonder what the time is. (Aim to build up to 30 minutes but do as little as 5 if you wish to begin with.)
Gently close the eyes and mouth.
Begin to watch the flow of breath through the nostrils. Perhaps you can feel it brushing the top lip on the in and out breaths..
Sit with this for a while.
Feel the change in temperature of breath, cool on the inhale warm on the exhale.
Sit with this for a while.
Notice were the breath moves to in your body. Don’t attempt to change it in any way. You are not looking for a deeper breath or more shallow breath. You are simply trying to become a silent observer of the process of the breath.
Sit with this for a while.
Notice the pause or stillness which sits at the top of each breath, between the in and out breath.
Here the breath is held within the body.
Next notice the stillness which sits at
the end of the breath between the out and in breaths.
Here the breath is held outside the body.
Take care not to try to change the pauses between the breaths. We are not trying to make them longer or shorter. There is no reward for a really long retention. They simply ARE what they are.
Sit with this for a while.
If you wish begin to add a mantra to this simple breath meditation. On the in breath hear the sound SO and on the out breath hear the sound HUM.
SO HUM meaning, ‘I am that’.
(Many students who find it difficult to focus on a sensation or in other words are auditory rather than sensory will find the practise of adding the mantra a powerful tool to help them along the road to stillness and internal focus.)
So allow yourself to sit quietly simply being aware of all of these sensations, the sound of the breath, the temperature of the breath, the pauses which sit between the breaths, and finally if you wish too the sound of the mantra.
A word of caution, don’t become attached to any one of the processes. Don’t seek and search for some perfect breath, moment, stillness. Meditation is practise. Sometimes it is blissful the mind sliding easily into a rhythm of awareness a potent and heady connection with the energetic body and the energy of the universe around you. Other times your mind will behave in its own way. The nature of your mind may cause thoughts, sounds, sensations to intrude upon your stillness. This is the job of the mind, to react to stimuli, to consider, ponder, engage in the world around you.
The goal of the yogi is not to dissociate from the physical world but to learn to
blend the five koshas. To explore the internal nature of being. By discovering
our true blissful nature we must understand that that exploration. That journey takes
place within our own bodies. We are not trying to lose our sense of self rather
this journey brings us closer to a more authentic way of being. Losing the anxiety,
expectation and the fear attached to our consciousness due to the non-
So practise non-
And as those moments of bliss arise, those glimpses of bliss which sit between your breaths when you feel connected to your true nature and connected to the universal energy we inhale with each breath don’t cling to it. Just observe it. Practise just being, don’t judge it, analyze it, discuss it, label it, change it, that action of simply just being with it will transform your meditation, your practise, your health it will lead you to a state of bliss.
With these methods in place – the mind discovers a place of sharp awareness, clarity and stillness. All thoughts, fears, anxieties, worry, passion, anger, desire, expectation both your own and that of others will dissolve. You will experience a deep relaxation of body and mind.
In the end the action of letting go and just being, moves you towards your own personal anandamaya kosha. Your own personal state of bliss. Thoughts suspend, breath seems to stop, sensations disappear, the total awareness, connectedness, blending of everything, every being, every single atom is so simple so natural you will wonder at its beauty and simplicity.