Posts Tagged ‘practice’
As a lover of short fiction, I was excited to discover Sarah Selecky‘s lovely collection of stories, This Cake Is for the Party, last year. Then, somehow, I heard that she taught yoga and writing workshops in the Toronto area, and was a practitioner at Centre of Gravity. And then I saw her name acknowledged as an editor on Michael Stone‘s latest book, Awake In the World. I just knew that I had to have a conversation with her.
So I used my yogi sleuthing skills to track her down and ask for an interview. In this exclusive video conversation, we talk about the parallels between yoga, meditation and writing practice; our mixed feelings about “spiritual fiction;” and how Twitter can be a powerful tool for building community and sparking creativity. Sarah also talks about editing Michael Stone’s work (his essays and fiction) and about balancing the unique relationship between editor, writer and teacher.
Sarah believes in writing as a contemplative practice. She’s been teaching writing classes out of her living room for ten years. Her first collection of short stories, This Cake Is for the Party was a finalist for the Giller Prize and the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book in Canada and the Carribean, and it was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Prize. She has also published stories in The Walrus, Elle Canada, Geist, and The Journey Prize Anthology.
She spoke with me from Whistler, BC where she is currently a writer-in-residence.
Follow Sarah on Twitter (@sarahselecky) for daily writing prompts and bits of inspiration. She also started Year of the Short Story (#YOSS) and Write What You Want to Read (#WWYW2Read).
** Please note, the first video gets off to a rocky start and Sarah’s lovely face is, at times, quite garbled. It smooths out after a few minutes.
“Yoga morons” on a New York City subway train get on gawker.com‘s nerves! “Isn’t their little public performance so joie de vivre and spontaneous and FUN? NO, it is not. It is dumb and obnoxious. We would rather sit on a train car full of shoe lickers than have to endure one of these.”
Oooh, sharp. But kind of true. I have to admit that I felt a little embarrassed watching this acroyoga demonstration, with accompanying giggles and homeless jokes.
How would you respond to seeing this on a crowded subway car? And what is the most embarrassing public display of yoga that you’ve seen?
Gawker.com: Yoga Morons Pose All Over NYC Subway Car, Make Homeless ‘Joke’
Yoga for Round Bodies logo: Ganesh was the original round bodied yogi!
There is an old Chinese proverb: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Tiina Veer, founder of Yoga for Round Bodies, is living this wisdom. Not content with simply offering yoga classes in her hometown of Toronto, Tiina has created a teacher training program to give others the skills to teach safe and effective classes for bigger bodies. In this email interview, Tiina talks about her experience as a round bodied yoga practitioner, her vision for a practice that is accessible and available to every body, and empowerment through anatomical knowledge.
What is Yoga for Round Bodies?
Well, now it’s about two things. First came the Yoga for Round Bodies classes (and occasional countryside retreats) offered in my community, downtown Toronto, which I am still teaching. The classes motivated me to evolve it further by filling a much-needed gap: training yoga teachers in Yoga for Round Bodies.
The Yoga for Round Bodies (YRB) classes are about Hatha and Restorative yoga practices specifically geared toward the rounder-bodied student. Only practices that can be modified for everyone are included. Yoga props are well-used tools in our classes, both for Restorative practice, and for creative pose modification. Offering YRB classes provides an opportunity for people who otherwise may not come out to yoga classes at all the chance to have a safe, fun and non-judgmental environment in which to practice and explore yoga.
The YRB teacher certification program is about preparing yoga teachers to better meet not only the round students who attend their “regular” yoga classes, but further to offer Yoga for Round Bodies classes within their communities.
What do you mean by “round” bodies?
Our cultural concept of “round” (fat) is clearly warped. Women think of themselves as fat if they don’t look exactly like the airbrushed and PhotoShopped models and celebrities that are impossibly thin even before the digital alterations. One of Cindy Crawford’s famous quotes is, “I wish I looked like Cindy Crawford.” As we all know, there are multitudes of women who consider themselves fat who are nowhere close to being so, and in fact can even be slender (or even emaciated, as with many of the eating disorders) by comparison. There are women who are simply svelte and voluptuous – in a Marilyn Monroe kind of way – who consider themselves “fat,” but where yoga is concerned, they don’t have a belly or thighs that impede their practice at all. Continue Reading
The ashram sits on the edge of Kootenay Lake (image via Yasodhara Ashram Facebook page)
Sustainability is a big deal at Yasodhara Ashram. The community has made great efforts to be sustainable: recycling programs, building upgrades, solar power and geothermal heating, as well as making a commitment to be carbon neutral by 2013. As the ashram leadership ages and the swamis are approaching retirement age, the community is also looking at how it will sustain itself. Where do swamis go to retire? What does a retired swami do?
I had a visit with the ashram’s spiritual director, Swami Radhananda, in her lovely dining room overlooking the lake. We talked about the questions that the ashram is asking and the changes in the air.
What is happening at the ashram right now? It’s in a place of transition, what’s happening?
Well, all of a sudden we realized we’re getting old. We wanted the ashram to consciously go through the transition of us knowing that we can’t keep doing the same thing forever. For me, the turning point really was the release of my book [Carried By A Promise, timeless books, 2011].
You’re realizing that the leadership here is aging, so the question is “What next? Who will lead next?”
We want to do the best we can to have things moving, and at the same time, the core stable and the foundation really solid. I am 70 years old, I know there’s only a certain amount of time. How am I going to use that time? But we’re all in our 60s and 70s now, so something has to form. It may be different but the same. Continue Reading
Swami Sivananda, contemplating the future (image via lightwaves.cc)
While visiting Yasodhara Ashram, a spiritual community on 120 acres of woodland resting on the shores of Kootenay Lake in southeastern BC, I had the opportunity to sit down with some of the leaders in the community and talk about transition, sustainability and renewal. What I’ve learned from my own yoga practice (on the mat, off the mat and through this blog) is that it’s a constant inquiry. At the root of my practice is the question, Who am I? The desire to find the answer to this question is what keeps me going, especially during times when I feel disconnected and alone.
So what does it mean when a whole community based on yogic principles and practices engages in a process of inquiry? I explored this with Swami Sivananda, a long-time ashram resident and teacher.
Let’s start with the basics. What happens in this community?
Our main idea is to provide a safe environment for people to get their foundation back under them, so they can start looking at things more deeply. There’s no dogma here. There’s an emphasis on spiritual values but not in a dogmatic way. But even if you don’t have that tradition within yourself, there has to be that respect for other people.
People come here and get themselves sorted out emotionally, drop emotional burdens from the past, memories, that kind of patterning that frustrates us. Then they just bloom on their own.
Yet we’re not a social service agency; we’re a spiritual community. We have a tradition, a body of teachings, and those teachings came from our guru. But we’ve broken the mold on the old guru-based community. It doesn’t need to be that stuffy and stiff as a lot of people think. Or as blindly surrendering. Surrender is a very important thing to learn, but it isn’t what most people think. The thing is, it requires super highly developed discrimination. Continue Reading
