TRANSCRIPT
HARI-KIRTANA DAS: Welcome, everyone. Thank you so very much for joining us for another community conversation. And I am very, very happy to welcome our special guest, Jen Rene, for a conversation about primarily about the connection between yoga philosophy and the practice of yoga on our yoga mats. Yoga asana.
Jen is the founder of Ashtanga Central. It’s a hub for live and on demand yoga classes, personal instruction, also Pilates tutorials, meditation, and a whole lot more. Jen has been practicing yoga for most of her life, and she studied extensively with some of the world’s best teachers. She’s been teaching yoga and Pilates for almost 20 years, as long as I’ve known her.
Her mission is to make Ashtanga yoga particularly fun and accessible, and she is very expert at doing precisely that. I can tell you firsthand from having had the good fortune of meeting Jen while she was living here in Washington, DC, and taking some workshops with her. And I’ve got proof! I’ve still got my lacrosse ball that I picked up after doing a workshop that you were co-teaching, and I keep this to roll under my foot while I’m sitting at my desk.
So anyway, thank you very much for giving me the inspiration to take good care of my feet. How are you Jen?
JEN RENÉ: I’m doing well. Thank you.
HARI-KIRTANA DAS: Good. Thank you so much for being here.
JEN RENÉ: My pleasure. It’s nice to see some faces and I always like talking about yoga, so…
HARI-KIRTANA DAS: I would like, and I’m sure everyone else would like very much to hear about your personal yoga journey you’ve been practicing most of your life. How did that happen? What was it that inspired you to take up the practice?
JEN RENÉ: Well, it was, I honestly, I just started to really feel this call to it. I had recently graduated from college, and I got a job in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I’d never been to Pittsburgh before. I got hired through the headquarters of a company which was in Connecticut, and they had me go to a satellite office in Pittsburgh and I was in temporary housing, still staying in a hotel. And I had never been to Pittsburgh.
I was 22. I had no idea where I was. I just was young. I had never done anything like that before. And I just decided that I was going to try yoga, and so I found it in the phone book. In the office that day, I printed out directions on like, MapQuest or something because I had no clue where I was going. It was before GPS and smartphones and all that.
And I went to this yoga studio, which turned out to be pretty inconveniently located compared to where I was staying. And the teacher… I get there and I was like, oh, can I just try it? And he’s like, no, you have to sign up for a month or you can leave.
HARI-KIRTANA DAS: That’s pretty severe.
JEN RENÉ: Well, it was. I really didn’t want to go back because it was like really not convenient to where I was staying. I think it probably took me like 30 minutes to get there.
But he convinced me because I also was there and I wanted to take class. So I go in and then he locks the door. So, like, you can’t, can’t get out. And I take this class that I ended up really liking. I didn’t know it at the time, but looking back, it was definitely based on the Ashtanga primary series. I don’t think we did primary series, but we did, the standing poses. And I ended up really liking it, and I kept going back for that month. Not every day.
And then after that month that I signed up for finished, I found a studio that was a little bit easier for me to get to after work. And then that was it. It I guess initially I kind of dabbled a little bit with yoga and doing other things, but it didn’t take long for me to just go all in and make that that commitment to practice.
HARI-KIRTANA DAS: How long were you in Pittsburgh? And was that the last stop before you came to DC?
JEN RENÉ: It wasn’t much more than two years, like maybe two and a half years. And then I actually moved to San Francisco and that’s where I did my first yoga teacher training. And I started to teach a little bit while I was in San Francisco.
Not really full time, but a few classes a week. Maybe, like maybe four classes a week or something. And that was actually a fun time because I had time to really devote to yoga. I was practicing a lot, and at the time there were a lot of really cool teachers and studios in San Francisco. I mean, I don’t really know what’s going on with the yoga scene there, but it was definitely a hub. That was probably 2005 ish.
So there was a lot of really great teachers there, and I was exposed to a lot of different styles, and it was just a lot of fun. Like, the classes would be big. There would maybe be 100 people in a class. So lots of energy. And I was really just having fun with yoga.
It was after I left San Francisco that I moved to DC. So that was 2006. I wasn’t in San Francisco long. It was like a year and a half or less. Less than two years. So I moved to DC for grad school. And then that’s when I found Flow and I met you. Anda lot of other really important relationships came out of out of there for me.
HARI-KIRTANA DAS: Yeah, we moved to DC in 2007. So a year after you. And I probably met you at Flow either that year or the following year. I was also pretty quick to find where I could be practicing Jivamukti yoga, which was the yoga I was practicing in New York before we moved to DC, which is kind of hot rodded Ashtanga yoga. It’s like, what happens to Ashtanga yoga when a couple of New York City performance artists get it and decide that they can do what they please with it, I suppose.
I also went to San Francisco a few years later, and I’m curious to know if when you were in San Francisco, you noticed the same thing I did, which I think is other people have also had that experience at West Coast yoga in general. And San Francisco yoga in particular has a very different mood than East Coast yoga.
And I also took some of those, like there are 150 people in this class and it’s a million standing poses. And it’s kind of like a hyperbolic mood. And I’m just wondering if, if you had that experience of, of this clear distinction between the mood of San Francisco West Coast yoga and the mood of East Coast yoga when you move from the Bay area to DC.
JEN RENÉ: There really was a different mood is a good way to, to describe it. So when I was in San Francisco, I did a lot of Rocket Yoga with Larry Schultz, which later became super popular in DC also, which is kind of funny. And I like that and then I would take a lot of classes at Yoga Tree with Rusty Wells or Janet Stone or Stephanie Snyder.
I don’t know if you ever did any of their classes, but they would involve a lot of like a lot of bhakti yoga, a lot of kirtan, right? In the class, which was super. I thought it was super fun. There’d be a lot of singing. I hesitate to call it chanting, but it was, but it was fun.
And then I got to DC. DC is just obviously a way different feel and a way different attitude than San Francisco anyhow. And I think that’s actually one of the reasons that I connected with Deb because she had previously lived in San Francisco and appreciated it. The different styles of yoga that I had been practicing and studying at the time.
Flow had such an awesome variety of classes there. And I think that’s why I always kind of liked teaching there because you really could find you know, like so many different styles.
But leaving San Francisco, moving to DC, that’s actually when I made the transition to an Ashtanga Mysore style practice. I continued to drop into some classes from various styles, but I started to kind of make that transition more and more to Ashtanga. And I think it’s because I think it’s because I kind of missed what I was leaving on the West Coast in like the, the energy of the classes. And, I kind of just started feeling this draw to more self-practice.
HARI-KIRTANA DAS: So, just to let everyone else in on the inside part of this conversation, Deb refers to the owner of Flow Yoga Center here in Washington, DC – one of the premier, and oldest yoga studios here in DC that had a few different rooms, a wide variety of teachers. And one of the nice things about Flow was precisely that the teachers were the star of the show, and Deb purposely got teachers that taught a wide variety of styles in order to accommodate the various practice preferences of so many people in Washington, DC, which certainly at the time and probably still was a really happening yoga scene. Anyway I taught there for a little while. I went to classes there, and that’s where Jen and I met.
And we pick up with the call to self-practice. And. I’d like to follow up on that, because I think a lot of people find the self-practice challenging. It one of the reasons people go to yoga studios is because it actually provides impetus to practice at all. You’re in the class, you’re with the teacher, you’re with other people who are also taking the class. Whereas if you were left to your own devices to just stay at home, you’d probably find lots of good reasons to do your practice in 15 minutes, or maybe in a half an hour, or maybe tomorrow, or maybe next week. Or maybe not at all.
So can you talk a little bit about why that called to you and what it means to you to have a self-directed practice?
JEN RENÉ: Yeah, no, I would love to because I do really like self-practice. There’s pros and cons to it to being in a studio is awesome, and it’s super motivating, obviously, to be with other people and have a teacher in the room. But there’s also a lot to be said about self-practice. And I think that for a lot of people, it’s kind of a logical graduation from at least daily classes in studio.
And there’s a couple of reasons that I really like it. One, I feel like group classes can really manipulate my feelings or my emotional state and like and that is super true from my experience in San Francisco. You know, I loved it, but you can really manipulate somebody or as a teacher, you could really manipulate a student’s experience with the type of music that you play or what you’re taught. If you decide if you’re talking about something in class like that can really affect, the emotional the emotional body of somebody, at least for that practice.
I think self-practice can be a really safe way to practice. So if you’re somebody who you know, who tends to maybe push yourself a little bit harder when you’re in a group setting and sometimes that’s completely unintentional. It’s not like you’re trying to show off necessarily.
But again, it’s like the energy or the just the actual heat temperature of the room. So I’ve found in my experience, especially as I’ve gotten older and my things just are a little bit more fragile physically, it’s much easier for me to not necessarily actually get an injury, but get something tweaked and feel like I pulled something in my back. And I have to kind of sit out for a few days type of not nothing serious.
But I feel like that can be a lot more likely to happen in a group setting versus self-practice.
I feel like, self-practice has really given me a chance to focus more on the internal forms of yoga. And to really to really kind of get that, that sense of drawing in. Again, because there’s just a lot of stimulation in the group classes that you have to listen to what the teacher is saying. You’re noticing what’s going on with all the different bodies around you. There’s music that you can’t control. There’s a temperature that you don’t get much say in so there’s just all these factors that can impact your experience. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing at all. It’s just a different thing.
And I you know for me being able to do mostly self-practice with occasional check ins from teachers has been really nice. I mean, I miss practicing in a community on a daily basis. It’s not really an option for me where I’m living right now. There’s not anything very close by. It would be a little bit of a haul. So I make a point of doing it – going to practice with other people, like once a week every other week. But most of it’s at home and it has been that way for a while. I do mostly do Ashtanga at home. Sometimes I’ll deviate a little bit.
And Ashtanga is particularly easy to practice at home because there is a set sequence. If I was completely left to my own devices – or sometimes I do it anyways – but it’ll be like kind of I’ll do like some Ashtanga and then I’ll be doing like Pilates afterwards and just kind of mixing everything together depending on my mood. But having a set sequence of vectors as you do in the Ashtanga sequence, or once you’re even once you’re familiar enough with, how to the order of poses are typically laid out in classes. It does make it pretty doable to practice on your own.
HARI-KIRTANA DAS: There’s an interesting balance between having your own practice and having a teacher to help you with your own practice and having that kind of guidance and also accountability. And I know you have some tools for people like you’ve got a 30 day practice calendar that’s kind of your own accountability tool, and a few other things to help people who want to develop and maintain their own practice. So I want to circle back to that. Let’s bookmark that.
For now, I’d like to ask, after we’ve been talking for about the last 20 minutes or so, if anyone has any questions for Jan, about her practice or how she works with people who want to develop their own home, practice their own personal practice.
Or for that matter, you mentioned also the internal practice. Nobody who ever came to my class got a chance to do an internal practice because I had the chanting, the set, this very specific mood. I had the music. If we were doing Scorpion pose as part of the sequence and Rock Me Like a Hurricane was going to come on right then. So it was that kind of class.
And so I really found it interesting that you spoke about your internal practice of yoga that was facilitated. And I’m wondering if anyone has that who has an active physical practice, has that challenge of being able to get into their own internal yoga space, when they’re doing a class, as opposed to when they’re practicing on their own. Because now I also practice on my own. My mat is actually on the floor right behind me. And anything more volatile than ambient music at a low volume that is almost playing at a subconscious level is too much of a distraction for me.
Suzanne. Go ahead.
SUZANNE: I’ve been doing yoga for at least ten plus years. I started out with Bikram so it was hot. And then I moved to Pennsylvania. Funny that you’re you went from Pittsburgh… I moved, I came from New York, moved to Pennsylvania. Found it a little more a little more difficult to find yoga places in Pennsylvania so I then started vinyasa. So I went to Vinyasa. So that was totally different for me. Interesting, because the teacher was very every class was much more into like every chance, every class was a challenge because with Bikram, you knew exactly what was coming next.
But now in Vinyasa it’s whatever the whatever the lead wants to do. So I find it difficult to just do a practice by myself, because I feel like I need somebody to tell me where I should be going next.
But does doing your own practice facilitate creating new ways to move in alike change the way because I don’t know, Ashtanga.
I really just know vinyasa and Bikram. So does it help you create your own rules, your own sequence of moves that I guess I.
JEN RENÉ: Initially, no. And if you’re if you ever practice with a super traditional teacher that answers, probably it’s going to be no. But I will tell you that Ashtanga is very old compared to other styles of yoga, compared to vinyasa. So whatever you’ve done in a vinyasa class it’s very likely that a lot of that may have been pulled from Ashtanga initially.
The other thing is that if you like that set sequence of Bikram, that is kind of how Ashtanga is initially. It’s like it’s a set sequence. And the benefit of that is that you get better at something by doing it more, you know?
And I think that’s one of the things that I always struggled with in other styles of classes is that I would be all excited about working on a pose whatever it might be. And then you don’t you go to the same class a couple days later and you don’t do that pose again.
So it really does make it hard to get proficient at something. So with Ashtanga, like it is typically taught one pose at a or like a kind of a couple of small groups of postures at a time so that you can kind of start to remember them.
But once you kind of learn what you’re doing, you learn Ashtanga a little bit… then whenever I’m working with students, then I give them the liberty to do take it from there, like you’ve kind of learned the rules. Now you can learn what works for you, how to how to break them.
If your body’s craving something, I would never tell somebody not to do it. But you know, if you just so you know that it it’s not like it’s not part of the official lineup or it maybe it goes someplace else, but if you want to do it, I would never tell somebody not to do something that feels good for them.
But, yeah, Ashtanga it definitely has a set sequence of postures that’s at least your starting point. But if you’ve been practicing for a while, then I do think Ashtanga is a logical progression for a lot of people, especially if you’re interested in more of a self-practice home practice.
HARI-KIRTANA DAS: Suzanne, is that helpful?
SUZANNE: Yes. It was because I do like a set sequence. I was just wondering. I just wondered if I like if every day I go someplace, I know exactly what I have to do, because then. Right. Because some days you’re good at something, and then it helps you do things. Some like I do the practice with my sister and there’s things she won’t do. She’s like, I can’t do that. And I’m like, okay, so I’ll have to eliminate it from the practice. But, yeah, I like a set practice. And I just said.
JEN RENÉ: Something that I love so much. I’m sorry. I have to interrupt you. No, no.
SUZANNE: That’s all right.
JEN RENÉ: You said something like, some days I’m good at things, and that’s one of the reasons reasons that I love any kind of yoga asana. But I think it’s particularly evident when you are working with a set sequence. So it’s probably equally evident in Bikram or anytime you’re just doing the same sequence of poses is that some days you’re good at things, some days you’re not. The pose didn’t change.
it’s really just kind of reflecting that you’re you changed change like it’s like it it’s just teaching us these little lessons of impermanence.
HARI-KIRTANA DAS: That’s one of the ways that Ashtanga informed my practice. I always had the good fortune of teaching at a studio where there were Ashtanga teachers, either at Flow or at other studios here in DC. And it’s simply true that repetition builds expertise. It also helps one to get comfortable with the idea that not every practice will be your personal best, and not every practice will feel the same way as the practice before, even if you’re doing the same poses.
And there’s a lot to be said for the continuity of a sequence, which is one of the reasons why, even when I’m teaching vinyasa classes or teaching teachers how to teach vinyasa classes, that I recommend that you have a base sequence that you always use, that you teach pretty much the same sequence for at least a month at a shot, so that you’re not making up a whole new sequence every day or week, or what have you.
And that you do that not only to make your life easier, which it does… as a teacher, it’s much easier to have like a base sequence and one sequence that you’re teaching for a month, as opposed to making up something new every week. But it’s actually good for whoever’s coming to your classes, because it’s not like they’re going to think, oh, this is the same sequence as last week. That’s not what happens. There’s a certain feeling of developing your practice by that, by that repetition.
And that’s one of the ways that Ashtanga informed my practice, which my personal practice isn’t an Ashtanga practice, but it is a set sequence. And it informed how I teach. How I teach teachers when I’m doing my own yoga teacher training.
Before we move into the connection between yoga philosophy and the physical practice, any other questions about what we’ve covered so far and what we’ve talked about and what Jen has spoken about, about her yoga journey and the elements of or the particulars of self-practice.
Okay, Ron says no. So that means no. Okay. So we can take it from Ron.
One of the things that I have always done, Jen, is that I started from day one bringing yoga philosophy into my classes. In fact, I considered teaching the physical practice as my platform for introducing yoga philosophy and practices other than asanas, such as singing or at least in my case, chanting before the class not right in the middle. The middle of the class is reserved for the Scorpions.
But I’ve always made a point of integrating yoga philosophy into my classes in one way or another, and I would love to hear from you about how you think about the connection between the physical practice and the philosophy behind it.
JEN RENÉ: I guess I really think that it’s all connected. So when, like you’ll look at Yoga Sutras and it’s really easy to think that none of them are talking about asana. But then if you look at them again, you can really kind of relate every single one of them into asana practice.
Even the beginning of the Yoga Sutras when you’re talking yoga, chitta vritti narodha like for me that’s that translates to this, definition of yoga, that it’s the filling of the mind. But if you take that to how can you start to still the mind if you can’t still your body like you have to start at this more outer sheath, this more physical level.
And for me, when we’re talking yoga asana, like when you’re trying to find stillness in a pose, when you’re trying to either hold a pose for five breaths or just not panic if you’re in an uncomfortable position or maintain some kind of focus on a focal point or your breath or whatever it might be, then that’s how you’re stilling the body, which translates into a stealing of the mind. So, I mean, I think that they really go hand in hand.
And when we’re talking about, relating, yoga philosophy into our asana practice, I mean, there’s just there’s so much in the, the sutras that tie into that. I mean, really like the whole first book you can pull into relate to your actual physical practice, whether it’s the amount of time that you’re doing it or the devotion that you put into it. And really taking your hatha yoga to heart, it just they all just weave together.
HARI-KIRTANA DAS: I think many times yoga practitioners, students of yoga hear this idea yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind, and it can easily be mistaken, for nothing is happening in the mind like it’s empty or there’s no activity as opposed to stillness being undivided attention on an object of meditation, which is much more dynamic.
And I find for myself that I can get much deeper into my physical practice when my mind is still, in the sense of it, is focused on observing the body that is moving, that I am willing to move in this way and that way and the other way. And in this sense, the physical practice becomes a moving meditation, which is an expression of the philosophy behind it.
And I’m wondering if you also have that kind of association or sense of the meaning of this definition of yoga and how whether in your practice you also have that experience of being able to go deeper into your inner practice through that kind of dissociative state of watching your body as opposed to just like being your body that is, is moving.
JEN RENÉ: Well, yeah. For me, that’s kind of where like some of the internal forms come in too. It’s this natural progression.
Most of us start with the physical level, like it’s so tangible like you can you feel an immediate change just even if it’s your body temperature warming up or you feel a little bit more flexible 30 minutes into your practice than when you started, and then you start to notice, you know more of the subtleties, like the quality of your breath, the quality of your mind.
Or maybe I shouldn’t say quality of your mind, but you start to notice less tangible things, like maybe some chiller thoughts and then maybe an increased ability to concentrate or to focus and any kind of start working to more meditative states.
And I think that that happens that can happen kind of immediately in the course of a yoga asana practice or even gradually. I mean, my physical practice has changed tremendously over the last 20 years.
When I started in my 20s, it was not exactly easy. But man, I recovered so quickly. And I could do asana practice every day and like some days now I would rather do a little bit of asana and more sitting or more contemplative, contemplative practices like more chanting or even just spend more time reading texts or working on, on Sanskrit or all these other ways that you can kind of embrace yoga studies.
It doesn’t have to all be as physical, at least for me. It’s definitely not as physical as it was 20 years ago, at least not on a daily basis. I still have, some days when I really like to have a vigorous practice. But I imagine and 20 more years it’ll be even more of the sitting practices and less of the physical.
HARI-KIRTANA DAS: Yeah. Time gives us a tradeoff. Our young bodies recover very quickly. But it’s hard to get them to sit still. Our older bodies, we’re a little more anxious to sit still, but it’s harder to get them to recover from a vigorous practice.
JEN RENÉ: All trade offs. Yeah.
HARI-KIRTANA DAS: So we get we get tradeoffs over time. And yes, most of us start with the physical practice. I regard asana as kind of a gateway drug to the philosophy, the thoughtful part.
And it does have a remarkable way of all by itself, kindling an interest in the higher truths of yoga beyond the physical practice, as we move from the physical to the connection to the metaphysical, our breath into the metaphysical… our mental and emotional state and how our physical practice affects our inner metaphysical state of being.
Working, gradually inward, toward just the idea of pure consciousness. And you mentioned that the fluctuations of the mind can take the form of likes and dislikes. Two of the five obstacles to the experience of yoga.
I know, for example, when I am doing pigeon pose, there’s a mantra that I chant, when I’m in pigeon pose. It’s very simple. It’s I hate this, I hate this, I hate this. As opposed to as opposed to other poses that I find, easier or I feel like I’m getting a different kind of charge out of them. I’m getting what I want as opposed to what I may need.
And I’m wondering if you have advice for practitioners who go through this. I hate doing balance poses because I’m always doing hop asana. Or I hate hip openers because, I hate hip openers. Or the fluctuations of the mind insofar as the obstacles or Illusion.
You know, illusion or egoism or likes and dislikes or you said earlier, like you feel like you’re going to die, you become afraid. So all fear is ultimately roll up to fear of death, clinging to life, the other of the obstacles. So I’m wondering how you connect the physical practice to overcoming, or what advice you have for people, as a teacher who go through this duality of likes and dislikes and, how to get the mind steady in order to not have that interfere with your inner practice as you do the external stuff.
JEN RENÉ: There’s a few things like, I guess one is like sometimes you are in those poses and it does kind of it they do bring up stuff. They bring up emotions. They bring up fears. Part of doing yoga is just having the experience of it. So, I mean, maybe all your job is to do is just observe what’s coming up for you if you’re just really hating something and just know that that will eventually change, too.
But I think when we’re really talking about some kind of fear response or a real flight or fight response the ability to just try to stay it’s challenging but shifting the focus back on the breath and just trying to stay and be there with it.
I always call them my near life experiences. If I’m in a pose that’s just like for me it’s usually some kind of deep backbend and it’s just making me short on breath and really just kind of getting some kind of fear response.
But it also makes me feel really alive, like, way more alive than I’m going to feel for the rest of my day. Most likely. It’s kind of like a feeling like if I’m having like a close call while I’m driving like somebody cuts me off and all of a sudden you’re like, just jerked back into full consciousness. And that’s kind of how I feel in some of these poses that I just want to get out of. I can’t let my mind wander. It’s not going anywhere else.
Like sometimes I could be in a forward bend and I’m thinking what am I going to eat for breakfast when I get out of here? But if I’m in some of these other poses, it’s like, I can’t possibly be thinking about anything else other than like what is happening in my body right now. And that does make me feel super alive. And it might not necessarily pleasant, but I am there for it.
And it’s always over so fast. Like, none of these things last very long. We’re talking about. I don’t even know if it’s 30 seconds most of the time. It’s over quick. So I think the best thing to do is just try to really be there for it, as unpleasant as it might be.
HARI-KIRTANA DAS: Yeah, I think that’s good advice. It’s also a good illustration of the elasticity of our perception of time, because when we’re in that pose and we can’t wait to get out of time, just seems to slow down. Whereas when we’re enjoying ourselves, time just zips right by.
And yeah, I think that’s a really good point, that we can be grateful for the poses that demand our attention and just don’t take no for an answer, because now we can’t space out. We can’t think about what’s for breakfast or anything else. And your analogy of being snapped out of driving on autopilot, that’s a really, really good analogy.
We have a couple of comments in the chat that I am going to share with you, and then we’ll see if we have any more questions. Liz commented: Hilarious. Given your email newsletter from this morning about what a mantra is and isn’t.
So my comment about… for all of you who may not have gotten this, I sent my subscribers an email this morning speaking about answering the question what is a mantra? And cast some dispersions on things that pass as mantras, but that, at least officially, are not as far as yoga philosophy is concerned.
So yes, my mantra – the “I hate this mantra” for hip opening poses, I suppose, falls actually outside of my strict traditional definition of a mantra. And I don’t think I should make it a slogan either.
From Nurit: one of my teachers used to say the things we dislike are the ones we need more. There’s probably some truth to that.
Nancy, will catch up to us in recording land. She had to take off.
Nurit also offered us a little bit of transliterated Sanskrit from the Yoga Sutras.
From Liz: being therefore the ultimate power play we get to make.
Learning to tolerate things that are unpleasant, I think, is one of the gifts that yoga asana gives us with regard to the practical application of yoga philosophy. We are told early on in the Bhagavad Gita that the non-permanent appearance of happiness and distress and their disappearance in due course come and go like winter and summer seasons, and one should learn to tolerate them without being disturbed.
So yoga asana gives us a very good opportunity to put that advice into into our practice. And it’s funny, I’ve always thought that was one of my favorite verses because we are being encouraged to tolerate happiness.
We don’t actually ever think of happiness as something we have to tolerate. And yet that’s the word that’s used in this verse. You put up with being happy, and you also put up with being unhappy. It’s an interesting way to frame it.
And then from Krista: yoga can teach us to become more comfortable with discomfort.
So, a similar idea. There are various areas of our yoga practice, both our physical practice and also other practices. The practice of acquiring knowledge that may also take us out of our comfort zone. Devotional practices that may take us out of our comfort zone.
Yeah, getting comfortable with discomfort is a nice way to put that and can be a good idea.
All right. Questions for Jen about what we’ve been talking about insofar as the connection between yoga asana and yoga philosophy. Any of your thoughts on this connection?
Paula. Go ahead.
PAULA: I just wanted to maybe put a shout out to those that don’t like a set sequence to practice all the time, because my practice consists of listening to my body and moving in a fashion to either bring joy or alleviate some discomfort that might be present.
And when I read that there are possibly 84,000 different asanas, I have to wonder why one would want to stick to a set sequence. That’s just my opinion. I also find that by listening to my body at the end of my practice, I have that state of calm that allows me to practice pranayama or meditation, because I have dissipated any emotional whatevers that might have been in the way.
HARI-KIRTANA DAS: Paula. Thank you. A very good point about how our asana practice in the classical system is preparation for pranayama and turning our senses inward and the progression to meditation. So it is a conscious progression from physical to metaphysical to spiritual.
Jen, how does Ashtanga deal with the very valid issue of wanting to listen to your body and move in accordance with what your body is telling you that it needs on any given day or in any given opportunity for practice.
JEN RENÉ: Like I said earlier, I think it’s really important to I’m never going to tell somebody not to do something that doesn’t feel good for their body or somebody craving something that I would encourage them to go that way.
And I think that there’s definitely a lot of people who take a more dogmatic approach to Ashtanga. And I would say that it’s really important to find a teacher who doesn’t, because you can adapt the sequence to fit your personal needs.
Like we typically start with sun salutations, but if that’s not feeling good, you can start with a seated sun salutation. You don’t have to be on your feet to do it. And there’s really endless ways to modify the sequence and adapt it to whatever an individual is feeling at a given time. But that also takes some kind of an understanding of your body. And the sequence itself.
So for just as an example, I had ACL and meniscus surgery. It was almost two years ago now. But you know, like after my initial period of not being able to put any weight on the leg, I just started changing the practice to it was it did not look like if you were to look at a primary series sheet, it didn’t look anything like that.
But it was kind of my version of Ashtanga until I could put some weight on my leg and then bend my knee like a very gradual process to get back to something that resembles Ashtanga after a surgery like that.
And I’ve worked with tons of students who have various injuries or different needs that you just have to adapt the practice for. And I think that that’s really the key is that you have to look at ways to adapt the practice for the student, not the other way around. Like you’re not trying to change the student to fit into a post. You change the pose to work for the student.
So there’s always ways and you know, if it’s not your thing at all, then it’s not your thing and you should do what feels good for you. It’s certainly not for everybody, even with whatever changes you might make, Paula. So obviously you found something that works for you. And that’s the most important thing. But there’s just different ways to make the practice work for people.
HARI-KIRTANA DAS: And I think that may be a misconception people have about Ashtanga because it’s a set sequence. It’s set poses. Therefore it’s like set in stone. And the poses are not adapted to the individual, but rather the individual has to adapt to the pose.
And this is a nice segue into one of the things that I know you have to offer your students, which is how to really infuse a practice with sustainability even when you’ve got a meniscus operation. And joy, which means not forcing yourself to do a pose that you don’t want to do. I want to get to that quickly. I just want to check in. You are unmuted. I just wanted to make sure. Do you have a comment or a question? All right. So I’ll consider that incidental unmuting. okay.
NURIT: I’m fine. I just, so agree with with Paula. I’m a dance therapist, and I, I like, just to allow my students to figure for themselves how the body is and what they like to do today. Investigate this. Yeah. So that’s all. Thank you.
JEN RENÉ: It is really meant to be an experimental practice, yoga. And I think that like experimenting with it works for anybody on any given day is so important. And, and not only is an experimental, but like you also just really have to have the experience of yoga. No one can have that experience for you.
Like you can’t possibly understand how a student feels just because they look okay on the outside. I mean, you could make an educated guess, but you could also be completely, completely wrong as the teacher.
HARI-KIRTANA DAS: We’re heading into the home stretch. So other any quick tips for our participants here on infusing joy and sustainability into your practice?
JEN RENÉ: A couple of tips. So one, if you’re interested in self practice, like you really just have to preserve the time that like pick a time that works for you that you can be pretty consistent with and just preserve it. Block your calendar. Don’t like make a point of not scheduling anything else as much as you reasonably can during that time.
And I think in terms of sustainability, you just have to look at it take every day as it comes and just you don’t need to have two hours to do yoga. You can do 15, 20 minutes if that’s all you can. You know, that’s what you have in any given day.
Constantly thinking of it as a long-haul practice. Like for me, I’m like, I want to be doing this for decades, so I can’t get on my mat and give it 100% every day, because that’s just not how my body works. I like to practice at about 60 -70% of my capacity, and for me, that gives me room to grow. Kind of like this just gradual trajectory.
And then joy. If you’re not enjoying your practice, if it’s not bringing you joy, then, I mean, that’s the whole point of it. And so if you start taking it too seriously or following too many rules or like being hard on yourself or comparing yourself to others, these are all things that take the joy out of practice.
And I mean, I think all these practices, all these teachings are to help us just find more joy in our life and how we are and where we are at any given point in time. So really just focusing on taking it lighthearted, finding the joy in it.
HARI-KIRTANA DAS: So for everyone who’s here live, I have put Jen’s website URL in the chat and you can copy that or click on it. And in almost no time at all, you’ll see a window that’s going to pop up that says, get your 30-day yoga practice calendar, and I highly recommend you take Jen up on that generous offer.
Joyfulness is actually an attribute of the true self. Patanjali, in his Yoga Sutras, gives a description in one sutra in almost an offhand way, that the truth nature of the self is eternal, pure and joyful.
So if our practice is taking us away from joy, it’s taking us away from our own true nature, and therefore is kind of missing the point of yoga. If yoga is ultimately meant to awaken our awareness of our true eternal being.
All right. last call for questions or comments for Jen before we adjourn for today.
JEN RENÉ: I want to just say to you, if anyone is interested more in Ashtanga. I have an Ashtanga starter kit on there too. I think it’s under free trainings on that same URL that. Hari, it doesn’t pop up. You have to dig a little bit, but it’s pretty easy to find.
HARI-KIRTANA DAS: I highly recommend that in addition to taking advantage of the pop up window that you look all over Jen’s website, she has a wonderful resources. It’s a beautiful website.
In fact, whenever I’m going to do a renovation of my own website, one of the first things I do is I look at Jen’s website to see what she’s done because it’s just so good. It’s just so inviting. So take advantage of this, very nice opportunity to go check out what Jen is offering on her website, both in the pop up window and in other, other places where you can just sort of wander around and see what’s there.
Jen, thank you so much. It’s always a pleasure to spend time with you, and I deeply appreciate your making some time to hang out with all of us today.
JEN RENÉ: Thank you, Hari, for having me. Thank you, everyone, for being here. I mean, it’s really nice to see people and I appreciate you tuning in. So thank you for the invitation, Harry.
HARI-KIRTANA DAS: All right. I’m looking forward to seeing you all for our next month’s community conversation. Have a wonderful rest of your day.