Prana Pages

At the end of my elder initiation, I was presented with a staff and a stool.  The staff to represent the higher wisdom that has been installed into my bones, and the stool to represent the elevated status I have achieved within the community.  I have come to learn that this status expands far beyond the reach of my work in African shamanism, but applies to my work as a yoga instructor as well.

My yoga practice has evolved over the years.  When I first started practicing, I’d drive 90 minutes on the weekends to attend a Bikram class, and then practice at home during the week to a Bikram tape (the old fashioned audio cassette type).  More often than not, I practiced alone. Then, I moved and practiced in the studio religiously.  When I wasn’t inspired enough by that, I started attending yoga retreats and workshops, always looking for inspiration from the teacher.  Then I developed a solid home practice, returning from whence I began, with a lot more knowledge on my resume.

Since my elder initiation, I’ve been called to attend classes again, as if to repeat the process with new eyes.  Studios are hiring me to consult, to inspire their teachers, to bring the teachers into community with each other. So now, whenever I step onto my mat in a class, I am no longer there to be inspired or served by the teacher.   But instead, I am there to serve everyone in the room through my practice and my support, on a subtle energetic level.  I can no longer step into a class with any concept of what makes a “good” or “bad” class or any other form of judgment.  Essentially, it is my responsibility to step out of my own needs and look at where the teacher and the students in the room are coming from and meet them where they are at, support and validate them for their places in the world, and encourage them compassionately and lovingly to the next step, the next level, without saying a word.  My practice must be in full support of the teacher, and be a model to the students around me.  Even if that means grooving in warrior pose to that hip hop song I’ve always hated, or listening to the student next to me breathe like a railroad train.  It is a total surrender of my ideals and my needs to the essence of being of service to everyone else.  It is finding a way to appreciate the hip hop music because it too has value, and loving the railroad breath next to me because it is ujjayi in its own way.

I give of myself, in every class, and the nicest side effect of being in service in this way is that I learn and grow even more.  It is from the giving, the service, where my true growth occurs.

In 2007, a Fire year, we burned.  Passions were high, anger erupted, and the heat rose.  Americans fumed when Don Imus’ racial slurs made the headlines.  Barry Bonds suffered a similar fate when his world record talents were revealed to be a result of illegal drug use resulting in bigger meaner headlines than his successes.  James Frey experienced anger face to face when America’s favorite talk show host released her ire at him on national television.   The emotion inside one man in 2007 was too much to contain, and so it exploded in massacre at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007.  When Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and wounded many others before committing suicide, the deadliest shooting incident by a single gunman in  United States history, the country mourned and wondered how such anger and hatred can exist.  Taking a moment, we all could recall our own personal experiences of Fire in 2007.

In 2008, a Nature Year, we changed.  Transformation became inevitable.  As the mortgage crisis worsened, gas and food prices rose, and the stock market fell, Americans everywhere found themselves facing major changes in lifestyle.  The scandals of 2007 were just an appetizer to the big business scandals (i.e. Tom Petters) revealed in 2008 that forced thousands of people out of jobs or into new ways of living.  At the same time, environmental awareness took a huge bump with the popularity of the Toyota Prius and other hybrid vehicles, and “going green” became a household term and corporate buzzword alike.  Unable to find sure footing in patterns of the past, Americans craved the message of Hope and Change from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton alike.

And now, we step into 2009, a Mineral Year. The wisdom of this year lies in our bones, in the stones of the earth, in all that is not burned in the fire, changed by the nature, or washed away in the flood.  In The Healing Wisdom of Africa, Malidoma Some’ describes the element of mineral as “the storage place of memory, the principle of creativity, resources, stories, and symbolism. . . it is the elemental energy that allows us to remember, to communicate with one another, to express our feelings. . .to remember our origins and purpose in this life.”    Thus, Some’ ponders that perhaps the turbulence we experience is a result of forgetting who we are and what our life purpose is.   2009 is about remembering, tapping into the wisdom in our teeth and our bones, and remembering what is inside the marrow of our being, and then communicating and expressing that to the world.

“Smile, you’re hurting your teeth.”  My first yoga teacher told me once.  Teeth clenching is a common phenomenon in yoga practice.

The teeth are the only exposed bones in our body, and often the best identifier beyond our fingerprint and DNA.  Temperance Brennan, the main character in the television crime series Bones, is a forensic anthropologist who can look at skeletal remains, teeth included, and determine details about the person’s life from the condition of the bones.  She can not only approximate the age and race of a person, but when and how certain bones were broken.  She can often speculate about the  hobbies, occupations, types of injuries, and in some cases, even chronic disease or illnesses.  All of this information helps her to determine the identity of the person lying on her table as a skeleton.

So what exactly do the bones do for us beyond maintaining the structure of our bodies?  According to the Dagara tribe of West Africa in Burkina Faso, all the history of one’s life is held in the structure of the bones.  All the memories, all the wisdom, all the experiences, all the stories. Dr. Temperance Brennan would agree.

So, when one of my first yoga teachers once told me, “Smile.  You’re hurting your teeth,” perhaps she was onto something.  I was clenching my jaw, gritting my teeth together, connecting the only exposed bones of my body as I could, perhaps trying to force the pose out of my body through my bicuspids.  She was right, my teeth hurt.  My teacher’s suggestion, one that I have offered to my own students time and again, was that if I smiled, even a fake one, the pose might just be a tad easier.  She was right again.  Bones are so much happier when they are not put into direct contact with one another too vigorously.

I wonder, if Dr. Brennan examined my bones, would she be able to speculate from my bones, particularly my teeth grinding habits, that I practice yoga?

So, this morning, when I caught myself yet again gritting my teeth a little too much while trying to maneuver from hurdler’s pose to low plank, I thought I’d take another cue from the indigenous tribes of Africa. After a couple lion’s breaths to release the tightness in my jaw, I grabbed a stone from my husband’s collection. I live with a person who tends to pick up rocks and stones wherever he goes and they accumulate in odd places around the house, so finding a small stone in the closet of my yoga room was not at all surprising.  I talked to the stone.  I asked it to serve as a surrogate for the wisdom in my teeth.  I told it to support me with its density and give me a little bit of its solidarity.  I asked that it tap into all the wisdom in the bones of my body and set me up properly to perform the maneuver.  I placed the little stone at the top of my mat right in my drishti sight line, and I attempted the hurdler/low plank transition again.

It worked.

As I set myself up in hurdler’s pose, my hands felt like they had become solid rocks, and I was able to lift up and float back into low plank without gritting my teeth and without crunching into my shoulders.

Now I understand where the term wisdom teeth came from.  If only I had kept mine after the dentist removed them all those years ago…