Yoga Training

I'm in a yoga training at the Ananda Community in Northern California.

Many daily essays about this are sneaking through at slowsonoma.com.

It's a long story,
and fairly interesting because this style of yoga,
Ananda Yoga,
emphasizes bringing energy into and up the spine in
meditation to open "higher consciousness."

All a bit or a huge batch suspect in the Feldenkrais world,
but that's okay.

What's interesting from the Feldenkrais perspective
is how little
even in a fairly astute
and definitely not
of the huff and puff
and strain
school of yoga,
how disconnected
these smart, wise folk
are from the human organism
as a work of art
as a functioning organism,
not so much bone and muscle,
but paths of movement
and modes of learning.

That's actually all I'm going to say
today,
except they keep talking about stretching
muscles.

What is so hard about perceiving a muscle
as something either long and at rest
or working and contracted.

If contracted, it doesn't stretch to get long,
it stops contracting.

If a muscles is chronically contracted,
yanking (aka stretching ) it can only
tear it.

If it can be coaxed into stopping it's chronic
contraction
by the many amazing techniques of our method,
then the muscle
1, has more length over which to shorten when it does,
giving it more power
and
2, stops wasting time in efforting to chronically contract.

Less waste means more energy
for us
and less pain.

Nice.