Intention

My intention over the next seven days is to play with Music as a way to enhance my practice and teaching experience.

practice

Practice daily. Use your daily practice this week to create sacred speech. Enjoy the Sacred Preparation SOUND. We are working with the fifth chakra Vishudda. The practice theme for this month is Attune. See the Virtual Class Studio or Live Class Recordings.

meditation

Practice daily for 3-11 minutes. Use your meditation this week to immerse yourself in the mood-altering and healing magic of music and vibration. Balance this with silence meditation.

COURSEWORK

one Make a 60 minute playlist for an active class.
two Make a 60 minute playlist for a restorative class.
three Put together a compilation of savasana songs that are approximately 10 minutes.
four Practice non-linear movement (aka Dance!) as often as possible this week.

reading

articles: pg. 188-195

Journal

this week Write 3 Morning Pages following by 2 minutes of Listening to Silence each day.

geneva

Share your favorite music!

SOUND - Week FOUR: Session 1: Music to enhance the class experience

SOUND - Week FOUR: Session 1: Music to enhance the class experience

Discussion
I believe that music is an incredibly powerful tool to enhance the experience of class. If the intention is merely to play music in the background, like at the grocery store or waiting room, then it may be best to teach without it. As mentioned, music is to enhance not distract. 

Music has the incredible ability to bring your brain into a flow state. 

• A flow state is a sense of fluidity between your body and mind where you are completely absorbed by and deeply focused, beyond the point of distraction. 

• Psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Jeanne Nakamura, who popularized this idea, describe “flow state” as the sense, or the state, of being fully immersed in whatever you are doing.

Meditation teacher Charlie Knoles gives the following recommendations for choosing music for flow state:

• Go for repetitive music with a strong rhythm, ideally starting slow and building up faster and faster. You see this commonly with chant and trance-based traditions such as capoeira, voodoo, and EDM, where it starts slow and builds into a driving pulse.

• Get active and energized. Start moving in rhythm with the music as it builds.

• Lyrics are fine, but make sure it’s driving and inspiring you to push through physical, emotional, or mental discomfort and into the blissful state on the other side.

Shiva Rea is a consummate expert in consciously integrating music into the yoga experience. It was from her, and from my musician friend and (authorized by Manju Jois ashtanga) teacher Julie Southwell that I learned of the Indian Classical music known as raga. 

• Each raga provides the musician with a melodic framework for improvisation. It is the mood or “color” to the music. We can use this concept to deepen the yoga experience for our students. 

“Music has an incredible power in the way it attunes us, not just to ourselves, but to our community and to life. Musical vibration has incredible potential to enhance (our yoga class and) our lives.” - Shiva Rea

When choosing music, do so with intention. As with all things yoga, there is an art to compiling a playlist.

“The secret ingredient is music that calms without making you sleepy, is driving without overdoing, and is emotional without being too specific.” - DJ Drez

Here are some practical considerations:

• Consider why you want to use it. Though I use lyrical music all the time, I know that words trigger thoughts and can be disruptive; instrumental music is a good option.

• If a song isn't working, you can fade it out or even skip it - this can be much less disruptive than having a song play that doesn’t align with the intention, theme, or moment. 

• Try to time your class sequence with your playlist. Track lengths have a wide variety. 

• I usually work with a 4-5 minute song per grouping of asana or sequence. I like longer songs in the beginning (Wave 1), energy building and balancing songs in (Wave 2), and a clear start to a restorative wave receding into a 8-10 minute savasana with about 2-3 minutes to close the class (Wave 3). 

• I also like to space my tracks out so that there is room for a breath or 2 between songs. 

• Like a yoga class there is often a bell shaped curve to most tracks. A typical song structure includes a verse, chorus, and bridge in the following arrangement: intro - verse - chorus - verse - chorus - bridge - chorus - outro. Learn to listen to songs and you will be able to time your classes so that music enhances, not takes away, from the yoga experience for your students.

• Silence is always an option. Music is a magical tool that students and teachers often love, but practicing in silence is often what people need. 

YTT Curated sacred preparation Playlists

Prep
What authentically moves you? What shadow aspect of your personality could you own to activate your classes? What painful "thought trains" are occupying your mind and potentially blocking you from positively envisioning yourself as the teacher you know you can be? .. try it like this - ask yourself using the first person, it lands differently.

Call Flow
11:30-11:45 am (15min) Openings 
11:45-12:15 pm (30 min) Talk Topics: Getting in and out of our own way, Shadow, Next Month, Assisting, Archetypes, Nerves, Transitions, and Music
12:15-12:45 pm (30min) Forum: What authentically moves you? What shadow aspect of your personality could you own to activate your classes? 
12:45-1pm (15min) Questions and Closings

Openings
Hopefully you've been able to spend some time listening to music. We Remain x Samantha Craine
When we remain we will not be like the bones of the forgotten city. When we remain, we will be the flowers and the tress, and the vines that overcome the forgotten city. We have woven ourselves into the cloth of the earth. We have mixed our breath into the expanding sky.

As a leader - someone who leads others, someone who leads themself, you want to get out of your own way and successfully turn what pulls you down into what picks you up.

A transformation like that is the result of deep listening. Deep listening invites you to go within to the emerging messages from your heart. It invites you to stay close. To learn how to trust your intuition above all else.

Asking yourself .. Where you would typically hide your thoughts, opinions, and ideas by withholding your voice. Now, through morning pages, you have the opportunity to write these hidden aspects of yourself down as reminders of your potential growth.

Does that make sense?

So, anytime something comes to the surface .. that is an opportunity to look at what was a hidden aspect, maybe you are seeing it for the first time, you can use that to expand yourself. Never is a negative thought or bad feel, or a strong negative emotion a bad thing. Those are all opportunities. They’re all lessons in the making.
You want to use those reminders to gain insights into where you could authentically language relevant truths in class.
(I believe that is from Angelus Teacher’s Enhancement?)

So what I mean by that is that you are taking your life. You’re transmuting it. You’re learning lessons from that. You are pulling out, distilling that medicine, those lessons, those ideas into something of use for another person through your classes. Thats what make a regular yoga class - where people are just doing the cues and it's good and it's solid and there's you know it's a good to something that can actually transform someone's life.

It doesn't mean that in the beginning you're going to transform someone's life. You don’t need to hold that as a priority but thats something that I think is import to think about from the very beginning, because the it changes the trajectory of how you’re going to teach and the weight with which you can bring ideas and thoughts and things you have learned through your practice, in your life, to be of value for others.

There are a few details to that, that I really want to try to make sure land with you. I think that’s something that will be uncovered a bit in this call through some of what you share. To I’m going to let that land for a moment.

To refine what you are teaching with how you are teaching, listen more deeply to your inner dialogue.

What is coming up for you? What is the loop in the head? What are the thoughts that are arising? .. as you practice. Practice yoga and practice teach because really those two aren’t so different. Well they are, as you know ;-) Reflection on practicing in community .. this feels so good .. i love yoga. Whereas teaching is a little bit of a job sometimes.

What authentically moves you? 
and here is the other side of that ..
What shadow aspect of your personality could you own to activate your classes?

Let me explain that .. here is an example .. my authenticity, the authenticity I show up with in class is like an f-u to the shadow aspect that said .. past tense, you need to be perfect to be loved. That the shadow aspect of my authenticity. Alright. So the wound, the shadow is: insecurity, unworthiness, its not-good-enoughness, the “never-good-enoughness”. Now I have owned that aspect, I have worked on that aspect, I have sat with, faced, and I have integrated and continue to integrate that. 

Now - yours is different, or maybe it’s the same??

Your shadow aspect on the other side is light. And vice versa, if you have a very light side, there is a shadow aspect to that needs to be integrated for you to really move into a different level of depth and a different level of awareness - for yourself. Then you bring that into your classes. Ok?

So in the forum you are asking yourself .. 

Forum

What painful "thought trains" are occupying my mind and potentially blocking me from positively envisioning myself as the teacher I know I can be?

The teacher that I know in my heart that I can be and I’m asking your to stretch a little bit because you don’t know what kind of teacher you are yet. You don’t know what kind of teacher you will be. And you are most likely in the place where you know what kind of teacher you want to be yet. So I’m asking you to stretch quite a bit - when I’m asking you these questions. Just like all questions, I don’t expect you to have a neat tidied up little answer. We are living these questions and we are learning from and sitting with these questions. So a year from now, you return back to the question and you’ll be like - hmm - this looks different, I am different, I’ve changed, this is how. Then that change that you have taken your own self through you can take others through.

What’s the loop? The thought loop? That is going on in your head?

It would be something like .. I’m no good at this, or .. you know what it is. I don’t really have to articulate that for you I don’t think. Though we can work on that in a few moments.

This will require you to get real, to trust the container, to trust the group and me, to be vulnerable, you game? 

Ok. That’s coming later in the call.
Alright,  I want to return to expand upon this idea of getting out of your own way.

God bless it, we love to self-sabotage, does anyone self-sabotage? Have you ever self-sabotaged? Everyone’s like no not me!

Self-sabotage is like .. someone give me an example of a self-sabotaging thing? That you do … I show up late sometimes, I can’t get all my ducks in a row.

Thats a form of self-sabotage .. its like I don’t trust myself so let me see if I can make it better. Something like that .. you will be able to explain it better than me.

Getting out of our own way
Sometimes as Leaders (as humans), we get in our own way. We have all experienced this? This can pull us down or pick us up. Sometimes the self-sabotaging tendencies can actually make us do better, perform better, be whatever. But, being “better” isn’t necessarily always better right. Sometimes it’s just a way of avoiding what is. Sometimes what is happening circumstantially or internally is really part of a bigger process that we can't see. We can't see down the road, we can't see what's going to happen next, we don't know whatever we’re going through at this moment in time is going to be teaching us for later.

Again and again and again and again - Trust.  Trust. The.  Process.  and Trust yourself. 

Build your trust muscles - trust that there is some reason that you're here (here in this program, but here at this moment in your life) and you may not know what that reason is - yet. Okay. So, how can you get out of your own way? 

Again, these are questions I want you to live into. I’m asking you to stretch a lot it fact today.

Sometimes the brain can make things more complicated; and sometimes it's not just the brain, maybe there's a gut feeling or a heart feeling, and it can be really difficult to discern what the universe is trying to tell us through our situations. Sometimes its clear as a bell and other times it takes some wrestling with, some sitting with, some feeling into which is all really hard work. Our entire culture is set up so that we don’t ever have to feel a thing. We are inundated with images of war all day long and not even bat an eye - that numbness. Thats what our culture - or overculture has done for us - make it possible for us to not feel anything and as yoga students and soon to be teachers who work with the body, in the body, experiencing the body, the temperance of the body, the impermanences of this body. All of this is heavy and hard stuff. In yoga class we are inviting people to feel, to be in their bodies, to feel the muscles, the ache in the heart, and the pit in the belly, and all these things that nobody really wants to feel. The energy in their bodies, to listen to the thoughts, to notice, and ultimately to observe. If you don’t feel then we loos are sensitivity and then we can go through our life without ever having done anything. I dont want to live like that, I am not interested in that. I am not here to be numb. I’ve spent enought time disassociating. I don’t want that. I don’t want to escape my life - I want to live my life. I’m not going to be doing that in a yoga class or teaching my student to disassociate. I want them to be in it. Which may or may not make a me a popular yoga teacher. But we can talk about that another time.

So, it can be really difficult to discern what the universe is saying, what it is trying to tell use through the situations or through the transformational experiences like you are having in YTT. You don’t know where this is going to take you in a year from now - or even next week.

The movement of figuring it out, getting out of your own way, and trusting the process comes as a result of deep listening. Deep listening invites you to go within these emerging messages - especially the ones that come from your heart, or trigger an emotional response. Thats when you know you have work to do. When you have an emotional response to something. It could be the smallest thing, the tiniest little infraction but your emotional reaction lets you know that theres something there for you to look at. Ok. So don’t run away from that. Triggers are like gold when it comes to personal transformation.

Therefore, I would like to invite you to stay close to your intuition.

Next month we work withe the sixth chakra. It has so much to do with your intuition, but being intuitive doesn’t just happen here. Intutition is expressed through your throat, it is felt in your heart, it is experience in the belly, it comes from the deeper knowing center within the body. Down in the pit of your belly down in the ovarios - the cahones - down in your bones. That is where the intuition lives. It is not here (points to forehead). It not just in this little spot in the brain, in the skull, with all these holes in it. We need to learn to intuit with all that we have.

Trust your intuition above all else.

It is difficult to discern if it's a thought, a feeling, projection, an expectation, or is it truly the intuition? 

When I say that, I have a little reaction personally to that like How can I do that? how do I know what that is? Then I have to calm myself down and I listen, and I listen and I listen and inevitably the smallest voice comes in to my brain and tells me where to go and what to do. If I take the time to slow everything down to listen to that I have never been steered wrong not once I have test tested this again and again and again and again so I know it's true for me. so maybe the only way you can learn to trust and count on intuition is to listen. I think that is the only way you can learn to trust and count on intuition, is to listen. 

This is why we do morning pages or journaling, or walking, or talking out loud, or going on these dates with ourselves.  I know there's resistance to doing morning pages. How am I going to find another 30 minutes of time - in the morning!

It doesn’t take time, it makes time.

The 30 to 45 minutes you spend in the morning journaling, meditating, practicing. Getting on your mat, taking care of yourself affects to trajectory of your entire day. If it can’t happen in the morning, then it can’t happen in the morning and that’s ok, but can you find some time within your day that you can give wholly to yourself.

Like they say, if you don’t have five minutes to meditate, meditate for an hour. And see how it makes the changes occur. I am far more productive in a balanced, healthy, gentle way, when I take that time time.

It makes time.
It expands time.
It gives you time.

Time that if you didn’t take, might be filled with something else - like scrolling the internet.

When we take these moments of time, we soften a bit.
We are able to get the dishes done without the drama around the dishes. We are able to have communications with our people that are clear and loving and grounded and not from a triggered state.

In your Morning Pages, I want to encourage you to try to really connect to that intuitive voice.

For me, the intuitive voice is the quiet voice. The part of me that I can access when I am reflective, when I am quiet, when I'm meditating. My life, and I would guess that your life too, doesn't allow for a lot of space for that to happen, but it happens. Regularly.

It’s more about the ritual than the routine. When its a routine it ends up being a chore. When its a ritual it ends up being a gift, an opportunity, a joy. Something that you enjoy doing.

So you might start to ask yourself questions like …
Where would I typically hide your thoughts, opinions, or ideas? Where would I maybe withhold your voice? 

So now, you have the opportunity to really write about these hidden aspects, to talk about some of the things that might be coming up for you; these sort of hidden aspects that can be seen as reminders of your potential growth.  Markers where you're like okay this is a place where I can grow, this is a place where I can expand. Growth is never easy in the beginning. You are growing exponentially right now from a yoga student, which will hopefully remain to someone who is willing to share from your heart, from your understanding who is willing to grow, to change, to evolve. You are moving from learner to leader. Therefore, any time something comes up, it can be an opportunity to grow, to change, to evolve, and to get to deeper understanding.

You can use these markers to gain insight into where you could authentically, language some of these truths in your class; to refine what you're teaching with how you're teaching, to listen more deeply to your own inner dialogue and mine that inner dialogue for the lessons. For the treasure, for the gold of the experience. Those are the themes that you're gonna use in your class! Not in your first class - let them come naturally - over time, through your inner work. 

If it's a negative inner dialogue, there's something in there for you to look at. If its a trigger, there’s something in there to look at.

Please don’t le me hear you say things like Good Vibes Only. Please put the t-shirt away because that’s not life. We have good vibes, we have bad vibes, we have things that challenge us, that might ultimately be for our benefit. And we have things that a super joyful and playful all the time as well.

So the vibe is .. authenticity. I don’t want to use the word too many times, but this is life.

The tantrikas say that everything, everything is part of our practice. We not here to make it aesthetic, were not here to make it perfect. We’re not here to make our selves perfect. We are here to have an experience. To be human. And with that comes alot of mess. Humans are messy, chaotic, but we also have a deep capacity for compassion, joy, connection, and this is what the world needs.

The world needs up to open out eyes, our ears, our hearts and minds, and listen.

We have enough doing, we have been doing for centuries.
We have enough productivity.
Lets slow it down and give people something of value - that is their own selves, minds, hearts.

Ok.

I used to think triggers were a bad thing - now I know that they are an opportunity and I can see them as such - and get a little excited. Lacy Philips says that you are getting closer to your manifestations, what you went when this happens. They are like tests to make sure you’re going to stick with what you know is true in your heart.

I did a practice in one of my courses where we were asked, when we did morning pages to highlight every negative thing, negative thought. (It was Angelus Enhancement for Yoga Teachers) Then, the take was to talk every negative thing and reframed it into something useful. In doing that exercise I found a treasure box of themes for my yoga classes.  

You don’t take a negative thing and make it positive. You don’t just flip it because then there is no transformation in that. But you take the negative thing and ask what is the negative thing telling me. What could I pull out of this negative experience, what could I pull out of my life.

In my life of course you know with Brendan being in a wheelchair and having Duchenne, like you want me to just flip that? No I can't just flip that right. I can pull out the things that, for example, I've become more compassionate. I've become more patient. I have become more accepting to others, less interested in perfection more interested in inclusivity. These are all extremely valuable things that I would never have if it weren't for this terrible negative thing in my life and my thoughts around it.

You have something of your own.

And if you don't have like a lot of negative things in your life that can also show you and reveal some things to you too like maybe possibly you're not willing to look at some of the things that are hard right you're maybe not willing to see the darker side of things and I will warn you when you taket his route there will be times of tears and there will be feelings of like like overwhelm okay and so I don't want to make light of this I also don't want to scare you into like not doing this kind of work. On the other side of that is a lot of celebration, there's a lot of joy there's a lot of fun that can be had once you work through some of the things that hold you back.

It is possible to transmute, alchemize everything into something really powerful. Pixie Lighthorse’s book The Wounds make the Medicine is an example of a whole book just on that. So let those lessons speak to you, ok?

The Shadow - next month we’ll talk about this a little more because we’re working with the theme sight - the 6th chakra, but the shadow shows up in our communications a lot so…
The Shadow is the part, or parts of ourselves that we try to hide for whatever reason, usually subconsciously. The shadow work, then, is integrating, accepting, even loving these parts of ourselves, so that they can be integrated into the whole of you. 

If you have something, and you don’t like it, casting out of yourself is just going to leave a hole. There is something in there, that was meant for you to have, meant for you to carry. So you want to pull back those aspects and integrate them into the whole.

It doesn’t mean that I’m so much different than I was, it just means that I’m ok with it. I feel at peace with it. I can hold it and the best things is I can recognize it in another and hold space for another. I don’t need anyone to change to make me feel more comfortable. I can hold the space for where they are; and that feels really good.

A good friend offered this definition - she said your shadow is something that everybody else sees about you but you yourself don't see and so naturally my curiosity is like, what is that thing that I don't see.

This is also what we call a blindspot.

Integration is key - we want to take these sort of uncomfortable, unbeautiful, annoying or whatever disowned aspects of ourselves, parts of ourselves that we would rather not have and integrate them in in a loving way. 

Also, with the shadow, everybody else sees it but you, and the shadow is most revealed within relationship. Anytime you're in a relationship like the one that we're in together right now, something will be revealed, unless it is wholly integrated, the shadow aspect is going to show up in some way. 

Anecdote
My shadow has showed up in the past with this idea of like, oh God I'm disappointing people, I'm not good at this, I'm letting people down. I'm working so hard but it's still not good enough. 

I know that thinking is only a part of me. There's a lot more to me than those negative bits and those parts of myself that I can't necessarily clearly see. 

Know that you are a whole person. The cosmic joke, you can’t see your own face. But we keep working on integrating. That is why we have relationships. Thats why we have community.

Personal work I think is shit without it being anchored in community, anchored in relationship.

If you sit by yourself and do all your personal work and you don’t actually integrate it into the life of your community of your family or your relationships, then whats the point. Its just self-actualization mastrabation and we can do better. We can be in relationship and we can learn from each other. We can grow our community and achor ourselves in the relationships and then the personal work has meaning and the personal work isn’t just indulgent.

It becomes useful, meaningful, real stuff. I’m all for it!

I think what's interesting is as we move from this voice centered self-expression into a more intuitive state which is the journey along the map (of the chakras) that we are going on, we're able not only own the dark parts, but the brighter, lighter aspects are also reflected. So when you look at someone and you see their beauty, you're also seeing your own Beauty.

On the other side, you can project onto another person and not take responsibility for yourself. Or, you can take so much responsibility that you don't give the other person the opportunity to do what they're going to do. 

Breakout session what painful thought trains occupy your mind that might block you from really seeing yourself in a positive light? 

So how does this apply to teaching yoga?
I set up this course to bring your attention inward, to know yourself.

You’ve got to know yourself. The relationship between you and your students is going to bring things up - for you and for them.