Summer's Horizons

A s you may have noticed, I've taken a bit of a vacation from this blog. Nothing formal...just a decision to write more slowly, take time out in the sun to recharge, or wander out and see the epic final chapter of the Harry Potter series. But I'll admit, as much as I'd like to siesta and keep it all quiet and sleepy, there are plenty of fascinating things percolating on the yoga horizon and for this blog. So this break of mine will be short.

For one, I'll be making a trip to Los Angeles in a week and a half, and I plan to bring back tidbits on yoga in LA and perhaps a few interview prospects. In fact, if any readers out there have suggestions of yoga studios to check out and yogis to speak with, fire away. All suggestions are welcome.

Two, Yoga Festival Toronto is coming up quickly - it runs August 19-21st at the National Ballet School; and this year's festival is shaping up to be quite exciting. In fact, a few nights ago festival directors Matthew and Scott (Remski and Petrie respectively - whom you may know as the authors of Yoga 2.0) threw a wonderful vegetarian feast for the faculty dinner in anticipation of the event. If the dinner was any indication, Matthew, Scott and the entire YOCOTO team have filled the programming with yogic inquiry, warmth and the lost art of hospitality....so it's well-worth travelling to Toronto from wherever you are to catch this festival. This year's guests are as diverse and interesting as ever - you can register and see the lineup here. Step up as scholars such as Dr. Frawley and Yogini Shambhavi deliver talks and instructors offer workshops on everything from the Yoga Birth Method to acroyoga. This year is also the first year the festival has offered yoga programming for children.

To boot, Shivers Up the Spine will be participating in one of Yoga Festival Toronto's keynote presentations in an interview with Mark Singleton, author of Yoga Body, The Origins of Modern Posture Practice.  The interview is built around the title, Beautiful Bodies, Broken Bodies: Yoga's Tricky Lineage and Physical History, and I hope the interview will address our very physical, modern practice as a hybrid of assumptions about the human body and the body of yogic tradition. In my mind's eye, I picture a 30-minute session of Singleton improvising around my interview questions, followed by audience members throwing their own unruly questions/thoughts into the mix...resulting in a public interview of sorts that will be transcribed to Shivers Up the Spine following the event. The interview happens on Saturday August 20th, 5:30-6:30 and I urge anyone in the hood to drop in on the festival at the National Ballet School and join the discussion! I will add a more detailed look at the interview content for the sidebar of this blog soon enough..

(Marla Meenakshi Joy & Ron Reid)

Also upcoming on this blog is a piece on Ron Reid and Marla Meenakshi Joy of Downward Dog Toronto, which I hardly want to say anything about save that the record shows that it was a delightful, funny and thought-provoking conversation...which means that the bulk of my work is already done. Don't you love yogis and their vivid journeys? I swear half the time i can't tell if i'm talking to a yogi or a flesh and blood magician...all the more so when you're talking with Ron Reid and Marla Joy. So stay on the look out for that one.


 T his way now the horizon is gathering some interesting weather patterns just round the bend of a reddish sky. No better time for a siesta...See you in a bit.

Geoffrey Wiebe on Mirror Neurons and Beloved Yoga Teachers: Free, Life-Affirming and Dangerous

(Geoffrey Wiebe)

T he word vrtti is an interesting one. It rolls off the tongues of yogis fluently, and I always imagine that word has the power to invoke itself...to bring on a ringing in the ears, a deafening hum of unwanted frequencies oscillating like a funnel cloud.

 "O h the vrttis... It used to be that I couldn't sleep till five in the morning". 

Amused and shaking his head, Geoffrey Wiebe was rolling his pale eyes upwards as if he couldn't possibly describe the nature of the outgrown predicament. The winter light was brighter than usual, like a flash flood through the wide perimeter of the cafe window, and Geoff was all smiles as he unfurled his lithe arms along the rough hewn wood counter. O those vrttis: the rapid-fire neural activity, that vortex of gapless thought that leaves us exhausted and wide-eyed in the dead of night. He was answering my question: "So how has yoga changed you?"

Sitting with Geoff it's not hard to imagine that the scope of his intelligence and energy could invoke a burden. Ask Geoff a question and you'll get a hundred intricate and vastly different answers; each thought digressing gently, the path dotted with Vedic tales, Zen koans, dialogue from screenplays and quotable one-liners from indie bands. Creativity and agility are no issue. And if you've ever been in one of Geoff's yoga classes the same is true. Exacting and detailed as a teacher, his one-on-one approach with students is as gentle and reassuring as he is in a face-to-face conversation.

The only child of a professor (of the philosophy of science and religion) and a registered nurse, growing up on campus in England was rich with opportunity, and Geoffrey Wiebe was introduced to yoga at 5 by an upstairs neighbor- though interest soon faded in favour of sport. The next invitation came over 20 years later with the ashtanga practice, taught by Diane Bruni and Ron Reid, with whom he completed teacher training in 2001. Other teachers include Mathew Sweeney, Richard Freeman, Chuck Miller & Maty Ezraty, and Geoffrey continues his study at the Downward Dog, Toronto. A graduate of U of T, Geoffrey has studied and worked in theatre (Canada, the UK, Germany, and Italy), made a film, and competed as a cyclist and rock climber.

(Geoffrey Wiebe, Teaching at One Love Toronto 2011)

As if all of this isn't enough, Geoffrey also presented an intriguing paper at last year's Yoga Festival Toronto entitled, Our Rishis Have fMRIs. The paper generated a wave of interest at the festival sparking ongoing debate about establishing teacher training standards. Drawing heavily from ongoing research in the area of neuroscience, it examines the critical role of "mirror neurons" in the yogic learning environment.

 In our chat Geoff is outspoken about his experience studying with beloved teachers, the yoga of surfing, his views on "grace" in a practice and how a yoga practice can make you free, life-affirming and "dangerous". And you'll notice he asks as many questions as he answers. It really is amazing that he can sleep at night.

(Geoffrey Wiebe)

  

"Modern neuroscience has shown that learning alters physical brain anatomy (neural plasticity) and can do so throughout a lifespan.  We become our patterns and our patterns shape us; and we exist more as a wave than a thing.  The theraputics of yoga sits in the ability to hone and shape this patterning (samskara, literally stain in Sanskrit)  through directed effort...  From a bad back to bad choices, and the two are inextricably linked as is our mind & body".  (Geoffrey Wiebe, excerpt from "Our Rishis Have fMRIs")

Guest Author Kathryn Beet: Evidence Based Yoga Nidra Heals what Ails You

(Lewis Carroll's sketch for Alice in Wonderland)

 "Let's pretend there's a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let's pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze so that we can get through. Why it's turning into a sort of mist now, I declare...And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright, silvery mist".  (Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll)

M ost days I forget any one of a number of things: my yoga card, my umbrella, or socks, at my home away from home, Yoga Space Toronto. Maybe that's just because of the sheer number of hours I spend at the studio. Or, maybe it has something to do with the slumbering ease I feel when I walk through those doors. You could call that feeling a kind of "nidra"; a diffuse awareness that day after day, my lost items will reveal themselves in some nook, some basket... and that the front desk will thoughtfully tuck my yoga card underneath their workspace yet again. I've come to trust that Yoga Space is all about making room for restful awareness; even if it means sometimes we're ambling around in a perforated, yoga-induced, dreamstate.

Founder and director Kathryn Beet began Yoga Space 15 years ago in a quiet alleyway on Bellwoods Ave in Toronto. Now expanded beyond its original space, the luminous hardwood floors on Ossington Ave are marked by a continuous, steady stream of staff and practitioners that have been with the studio for years. Kathryn is a sensitive, highly-intuitive and skilled teacher whose teaching style is a powerful blend of intelligent use of energy, and rigorous demand for the hard-facts; the evidence of the therapeutic benefits of asana. She prefers discussions that stay grounded in the physical realities of individual bodies, providing detailed verbal instruction, highly-effective hands-on augmentation, and definitive demonstration. She has been providing Yoga Therapy for individuals in clinical settings for 10 years. Gleaning insight from the many teachers, therapists and artists she has worked with over the years, she has created a unique fusion of yoga therapies in Therapeutic Yoga, which she has been cultivating at YogaSpace for 4 years. 

I had a rainy day chat with Kathryn Beet about her own practice; and discovered her growing interest in Yoga Nidra. I immediately asked if she would be willing to contribute her ideas as a guest author. In the following post, Kathryn explores the mounting scientific evidence in support of the long tradition of Yoga Nidra, its therapeutic benefits, and its transformative potential.
~ ~ ~

Evidence Based Yoga Nidra Heals what Ails You
by Kathryn Beet

(Photo of Savasana, Corpse Pose, covered in a blanket)

Y oga Nidra, which means sleep of the Yogi, is an ancient, sacred yogic practice of meditation that can lead to profound changes in both mind and body.  It is a vital resource for transforming physical health and reshaping personal, interpersonal and professional relationships.  The origins of Yoga Nidra can be traced back to the ancient sacred teachings of Yoga and Tantra.  The practice has been revived over the last half century by Yogis, such as Swami Satchidananda and Nischala Joy Devi, to name a few.  Most recently, clinical psychologist Richard Miller has effectively demonstrated the indubitable healing potential of Yoga Nidra to mainstream North America.

Founder of the Integrative Restoration Institute in California, creator of iRest Yoga Nidra and author of Yoga Nidra, A Meditative Practice for Deep Relaxation and Healing, Miller serves as a research consultant, researching the healing effects of Yoga Nidra on diverse populations including soldiers, veterans, college students, children, seniors, the homeless and people suffering from depression, anxiety, chronic pain, insomnia, chemical dependancy and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, (PTSD).

In 2006, the United States Department of Defense conducted research on the iRest Yoga Nidra protocol with soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan experiencing PTSD.  Following the study, the Deployment Health Center integrated Yoga Nidra into it's weekly treatment program for soldiers. Yoga Nidra classes have subsequently been set up in treatment facilities throughout the U.S.

Syrinx and Systole, Guest Author Matthew Remski Introduces his New Book of Poetry

(Syrinx 2, Marion Dunleavy)

"She will recede with each increment of
light, with each syllable you find in your throat like a cave
painting. The reverberation in the bark is the stutter of your
hand letting her go.

The choir of earth. Over the reeds, the long exhale of don’t
know anything. The shiver that cracks the spine as more
apples blossom, turn red, turn cider, turn vinegar, turn ash." 

(from Syrinx and Systole, Matthew Remski)

M ost of you know Matthew Remski as co-director of Yoga Festival Toronto, an Ayurvedic Health Educator and Practitioner, and adjunct faculty member for many Yoga Teacher Training Programmes in Toronto. Many people are also familiar with the Matthew Remski, who, along with fellow yogi and author, Scott Petrie, co-authored the wildly imaginative and iconoclastic text on re-embodying yoga, entitled Yoga 2.0. But perhaps you are not aware that he has also published several novels, and founded Scream in High Park, a literary festival that has since grown into the 2-week-long crowning event of alternative Canadian literature. Now, on the heels of unleashing Yoga 2.0, Matthew will be releasing his first book of poetry in fifteen years. A book launch will be held at the Supermarket (in Toronto's Kensington Market) on Tuesday, November 16 · 7:00pm - 9:00pm. 

I asked Matthew if he would like to contribute a piece of writing about the launch of his new book, and he responded,

 "Sure. should it be manifesto-style?"

 And Matthew, oracular and enigmatic, offered us this arrangement of words.
~

(The Unknown Potter, Arthur Boyd)

on launching syrinx
by matthew remski

the pages are lined with consciousness and birdsong, orality and aurality, the oscillation of separateness and communion, space and its filling, the dissociation of seeking, the pervasion of being found, loving the identity-trauma of learning.  learning as terrible pleasure, learning as food.  learning is food, so we are fed by what we have yet to know.

content is paramount: form serves it like a dish serves food.  sleep washes the dishes.

the structure of this book saddens.  not because of its sentiment, which chirrs and clicks between the oriole and the occipital.  not because it is this book, as opposed to any other, it is sad because as a collection of meditations it does not like the prison of a book generally.  it cannot understand the mathematics of a print run, why its words cannot change.  it flutters confused and now resigned against the papers, against the spine.

When Discipline Sets You Free, The Beauty of a Dogmatic Practice: David Robson on Mysore-style Ashtanga Yoga

(David Robson, right. with pilgrims at Sravanabelagola)

"The beauty of the practice is that, inside of the structure of it, there is still room for interpretation." (David Robson, Co-Owner and Director of Ashtanga Yoga Centre of Toronto)

(David Robson, photo by Cylla von Tiedemann)

T o be honest, it makes little sense to hear David Robson, co-owner and director of the Ashtanga Yoga Centre of Toronto, talk about struggling with focus. He wakes up at 3am each morning in order to do a few hours of asana practice before he heads out for his teaching day which begins at 6am. But then, it's often the people who have a measure of focus that know how disconcerting it is to work without it.

After completing a degree in Comparative Religion, David Robson made his first trip to Mysore in 2002, where he initiated studies with his teacher Sharath Rangaswamy. Since then he has returned annually to deepen and enrich his practice and teaching. In 2008 David was Authorized to teach Ashtanga by the Sri K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute of Mysore, India.

I first saw David Robson speak at Yoga Festival Toronto, in a workshop he provocatively titled, Dogma and Discipline. In our hour-and-a-half workshop, David put about thirty practitioners through their paces, slowly and deliberately teaching a sun salutation, followed by standing poses from Ashtanga's first series. Words like regulation, prescription, numerical breathing, dharana, and drsti filled the air; sibilant, measured and consistent as the clock's tick on the back wall of the studio. Each pose was meticulously explained, adjustments were made, we were instructed to find stillness in each pose, and to submit to the discipline that each posture promises.  Furthermore, each student was clear by the end of the class that there were to be no extraneous gestures; no cycling of feet in downward dog, no flicking back of hair strands, and no readustments of spandex, in the repetition of this traditional sequence.

But, as is obvious in our interview, you would be making a mistake if you assumed David Robson was a dogmatic personality, or a rigid teacher that measures out generic prescriptions from the topsoil of his yogic life. Instead, David's approach is the result of years of mining his own search for realization. As David says, "the body is your laboratory"; and, he's taken a look at the substrata of his own makeup, and its fairshare of competing and contradictory inclinations.

In our interview, we have the privilege of observing David's map of complex choices, as he searched for something, "a spiritual high", he couldn't quite name. From his first self-taught encounter with yoga from a nameless book of poses, to playing in an improv post-rock band with Peaches, to travelling the world seeking out his version of Maslow-inspired "peak experiences",  and teaching Bikram Yoga, Robson's early experiences with yoga are energetic and restless. Not until he met Sri K. Pattabhi Jois and his grandson, Sharath Rangaswamy, did Robson feel he had found a powerful diagram for transformation: Mysore-style Ashtanga yoga.

(David Robson at Yoga Festival Toronto, 2010)

 "I was pretty irreverent in my approach to yoga initially. But, you know in some ways, the seriousness with which you approach it, seems to be proportionate with the change that it can effect".  

             (David Robson, Co-owner and Director of the Ashtanga Yoga Centre of Toronto)

~

Dogma and Discipine, Interview with David Robson of Ashtanga Yoga Centre of Toronto:

 Priya Thomas: Hi, is that David?

David Robson: Hi Priya, how are you?

Priya: good thanks, thank you for doing this...So when did you start practicing yoga?

David Robson: I started doing asana classes about twelve years ago. I started with Sivananda style. A friend of mine knew I liked yoga; I had been doing it out of books and things like that..but very infrequently. And so she brought me to a class. And I had no idea actually that were yoga classes.

Priya: Really??

David: Yeah (laughing)

Priya: So where did you find books from?

David:  You know I can't even remember the books that I had. I had books with different pranayamas, and things like that; and simple asanas. But I didn't know that people were in rooms doing it together! I thought it was just something you always did alone.

Priya: oh wow.

David: Yeah I had no idea. I guess I was just out of it! (laughing). So anyway, this friend brought me to a Sivananda class in Toronto; the one at Spadina and Harbord. And I was amazed that all these people were in a room together doing it! And there was a teacher walking around; and it was so relaxing. I immediately fell in love. And at the time, I had just come back from a long trip away, and I had just started studying religion and U of T. So the week after that, I went back twice; and then before I knew it, almost right away, I was going every day.

YOGA 2.0: Mala 1, by Matthew Remski and Scott Petrie - A War-Cry Manifesto for Deconstructing the Yoga Body

Matthew Remski and Scott Petrie's new book is a must-read

"The doors of life must be broken to test the hinges and the doors."

Andre Breton, 1922

wrote eccentric, dissident artist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, in the Futurist Manifesto of 1908, as he announced a brand new art movement that was daring forward at breakneck speed into the unknown. In a wholescale rejection of the past, he affirmed that the basic structures of the day must be destroyed in order to be put to the test. In 1924, Andre Breton put out an inflammatory piece of writing called Le Manifeste du Surrealisme in which he proclaimed: 

 "The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly"

 In Yoga 2.0, Mala 1: Shamanic Echoes,  authors Matthew Remski and Scott Petrie declare:

"...all yogis must resist Yoga. If you meet the "Yogi",  kill the "Yogi".

In the art-world, this kind of hyperbole may be commonplace. But in the tenderfooted, deferential, and well-mannered world of contemporary yoga, this kind of statement carries a tenor decidedly more sweeping and incendiary. As if that is not warning enough, this book comes with an additional warning. Namely, that this is not a book at all.

Matthew Remski

Scott Petrie

It is not a textbook, or a guidebook, or a warm and fuzzy personal account of the trinkets and prizes hard won by the soul through earnest yoga practice. There are no anatomical drawings; or prescriptions for specific asanas. In fact, by the latter part of the book, the book admits it does not want to be a book. In fact, it's suspicious of book culture altogether. Then you notice that all its careful observation is countered by equal proportion of wild hypothesis and adventurous suggestion. Well then, you think, this is not the work of a neutral observer, or a cool academic, or worthy scientist, is it? And, from the quote above, anyone can see that it doesn't shrink at provocation. So what is this colorful piece of writing... this delinquent, prodigal text written in grand hyperbole and rich allegory?

Yoga 2.0 is nothing short of a yoga manifesto, replete with similar hallmarks, props and literary devices. By the time Matthew and Scott are done with their narrative of yoga, as it ticks through the timeline of evolutionary biology, "Capital Y" Yoga, as a permanent entity, with appeals to scriptural authority and authenticity, is, if not demolished, at least knocked around a bit. By the end of the book,  contemporary yoga practice looks rickety enough that it might be little more than an elegant acropolis built from toothpicks.

Guest Author: Michael Stone on Freeing The Body, Freeing The Mind: Connecting Yoga & Buddhism

Michael Stone, Centre of Gravity summer practice 2010, photo Andrea de Keizer

Michael Stone is a yoga teacher and psychotherapist who leads yoga and meditation workshops and teaches internationally on the effectiveness of yoga and Buddhist meditation in clinical psychotherapy practice. His approach to yoga focuses on the integration of theory and practice in a way that is rooted in tradition yet responsive to contemporary culture. He is the founder of Centre of Gravity Sangha, a community of yoga and Buddhist practitioners based in Toronto, where he lives. He has published several books including, The Inner Tradition of Yoga, and Yoga for a World out of Balance. His newest publication, Freeing the Body, Freeing the Mind is a collection of writings by prominent teachers in Yoga and Buddhism, that investigates the common threads in both traditions.

I had a hard time finding Centre of Gravity on my first visit; that's despite Bellwoods Avenue having been a street I lived on for many years. It's nudged quietly in between the residential rows; and I think there was something on the website about finding a red door. And then, Michael had also said something about arriving early. Inside, on wooden floors in a long hall, lined by low lying book shelves, people spread their mats alongside one another in two careful rows; leaving about an inch of space in between. It was intimate. This was the closest I'd been to anyone else in a room while practicing. Intimacy and community is something Michael likes to talk about; he brought it up again this weekend in a few workshops at Yoga Festival Toronto. As guest author of the following post, he traces the intimate connections between Buddhism and yogic practice, so that we can find our way through otherwise cryptic maps to the red door; and to the helix that marks the communal meeting spot of the body and the mind.

~ ~ ~
Freeing The Body, Freeing The Mind: Connecting Yoga and Buddhism

by Michael Stone

Over the years, I’ve found it increasingly frustrating that Yoga is continually reduced to “a body practice” and Buddhism “a mind practice.” This makes no sense at all. Anyone who has practiced deeply in both traditions knows that the Buddha gave attention to the body, Patanjali the mind, and both traditions value ethical precepts and commitments as the foundation of an appropriate livelihood. I organize a community in Toronto called Centre of Gravity Sangha, a thriving group of people interested in integrating Yoga and Buddhist Practices.

"Who" is the Final Destination? The Looking Glass and Sister Elaine MacInnes

It really depends on how you look at it. But you can see a wave forming before it actually comes up. I mean, you can see it underneath, before the surface rolls over.  There's an introduction, a pre-amble, a subtle shrinking almost in the opposite direction that happens a split second before the swell.  Something that hints at what's really going on.
Extraordinary people are wonderful to watch when they are doing extraordinary things. That's obvious. But extraordinary people at rest are also a revelation; because they look empty until something comes through them. And they appear aware of that fact...of that ground zero....Resting in some steady neutral...

Sister Elaine MacInnes, Yoga Festival Toronto 2010

Sister Elaine MacInnes is sitting in an S-shape. At eighty-something, she is curved gently over the clay colored metal chair in the mirrored room at the National Ballet. The light is peppered unevenly, glowing grey in the early evening, coming through the slender rectangle of a window on the far left corner. Sister MacInnes' chair is tilted to the right; and the floor, a smoke-blue, is covered is washy streaks left by toe shoes....like ice-skates, the geometric shapes, half-arcs, scratched into the reflective surface of its rubber.

And then with a few words everything about her unfolds, quite literally, as she opens her shape across the chair and leans into the small gathering at this weekends Yoga Festival Toronto.

5 QUESTIONS WITH MATTHEW REMSKI, CO-FOUNDER OF YOGA FESTIVAL TORONTO

Matthew Remski, Co-founder of Yoga Festival Toronto

Matthew Remski is the co-founder of this weekend's Yoga Festival Toronto, which runs August 20th through 22nd, at the National Ballet School. Matthew and I first met when I was fifteen. We were both part of a week-long intensive held in Ottawa designed for politically-inclined youth from across Canada called Forum for Young Canadians. I think in our mock parliament, Matthew was the anarchist. As you can see from the Q&A, some things don't change...some fish swim upstream. He had a few minutes to type out his thoughts about this weekend's Yoga Festival and his involvement in Yoga Community Toronto. Our conversation below: