Yoking, Yearning & Yoga

Kyra is drawing explosive, volcano flower sunbursts.

Jessica is plotting plant patches for her garden.

Kai wants to ride one of the puffy white clouds that dangle in the blue.

And Jordan is training his bull calves.

As I move through the postures of my yoga routine, the thought forms: it’s all yoga. Yoga: the Sanskrit word for “union,” and a root form of our “yoke,” means to join or connect, to form a bond. In yoga, a practitioner breathes into bodily shapes that draw our sensory selves into the present, so we can unite with ourselves, unite with what is. In all these activities too, these kids are joining and connecting, creating the relationships that will support them in unfolding what they have to give.

Isn’t this what life is about?
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It is not easy to form a yoke.

In order to train his bull calves, Jordan first had to make one: a crossbar pierced by two semi-circle bows that would embrace the calves’ heads. Choosing a slice of birch, he carved a curvy bracket with his draw knife, drilled four holes, and began a regime of linseed oil application. A yogurt container stuffed with an old rag lives by our sink.

Then for the bows, he needed a special kind of hard but bendable wood. After a couple of scouting trips around the farm, he found the perfect shagbark hickory tree—big enough that he needed help felling it. After he and Geoff lopped off the limbs and dragged it back home, Jordan split the log into sixteenths and took out the heart to make two four foot lengths of one-inch chunk. It was hard. Would the wood bend?

We devised an apparatus for the top of our wood stove: on top of a water-filled spaghetti pot with vented lid, we placed with an upside down funnel, on which sat a PVC joint holding a five foot length of PVC piping. It looked like the stove had sprouted rabbit ears. Into the pipe went the bow. After a steamy soak, Jordan took out the wood, held the ends, and bended it like licorice around his knee. One bow bowed, the other quickly followed. Minutes later the bows were as hard again as the wood they were. After drilling some more holes and gathering the proper pins, Jordan’s yoke was ready to go yoking.

At first, the bull calves weren’t so sure about the yoke, but they liked the attention, the nose and neck scratches, and the walks around the yard. By now they seem quite comfortable, pleased to play this pulling game for a few minutes every day. Jordan guides them around the yard with his stick yelling “Gee!” to go right, and “Haw!” to head left. Then he says “Whoa!” and stands in front of them to block their way, his stick a wall. Good thing they are only calves.

The smile on his face when he came in today says it all: “Oh they were so good today!”

Kai agrees.


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A yoke is the piece of wood, carved and shaped.

A yoke of oxen is what the calves will become when they pull as one.

To yoke is to join or connect these independent powers in the service of a common goal—becoming one force for action.

The questions arise: What kinds of yokes are we creating for ourselves? With what or whom are we joining? What kind of relationships do we want to create?

What are we yearning to do?

These kids seem to know.

Myth 4: Exercise to Lose Weight

“I can’t do yoga!” said the voice that clanged in my head. “I need to burn calories!”

There was a time when the voice ruled. I was convinced that unless I did some vigorous aerobic activity—running, biking, swimming, or walking—I was sure to balloon out. I needed to exercise and daily, so that I could eat without worry.
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It is a familiar line—a causal link drawn between exercise and weight. We hear it and barely blink. It seems so reasonable, the flip side of the diet myth (Mar. 18). If the difference between energy in and energy out determines the heft of our fat stores, then all we need to do is add more exercise to our lives and the pounds we don’t need will disappear. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends that we exercise to maintain weight. The American Heart Association and American College of Sports Medicine agree. Nutritionists say so too. Because science says so. Or does it?

Another diet myth is fading. The exercise-equals-weight-loss hypothesis took root in the late 60s, and since that time its veracity has been impossible to prove. (In preceding decades, it was assumed that exercise promotes weight gain or at best, slows the rate of loss.) When the myth hatched, it was based on two studies that have not been replicated. Still, it spread rapidly and for decades it has reigned, despite the lack of clinical evidence. A review of relevant literature in 2000 concluded that the relationship between exercise and weight is “complex.” While exercise may help some who lose weight keep it from coming back as quickly; it helps others who lose weight pack it on again. (See Taubes)

Why the lack of confirming evidence for what seems like common sense? A story line is emerging.

For one, experts say, the vast majority of us don’t exercise enough to make a difference. We overestimate our calorie expenditure—often forgetting to subtract our base metabolic burn off, for example—and then overcompensate in what we eat. We run a quarter mile (expending 25 calories) then “treat” ourselves to a piece of pie (for 400). (See Kolata)

Second, even when we do exercise strenuously, our hunger keeps pace, holding our body weight in place, if not immediately then in the next day. In the case of lean athletes, moreover, it may be that a biological propensity to spend energy propels them into extreme sports in the first place, rather than the reverse.

Thus, just as scientists are discovering that diets don’t work and offering an explanation based on a body’s weight-maintaining powers (Mar 18), so too they are discovering that exercise doesn’t work, and for a similar reason. Our bodily processes for metabolizing food are so crafty and complicated that they defy our efforts to control them, whether we diet, exercise, or both together. Desire is to blame.

Are we doomed to a fruitless struggle with a voracious desire and an expanding waistline? Is there no way to guarantee that we can and will have the bodies we want?

The questions betray the anxiety that our diet culture breeds. We are obsessed with food, with the pleasure we might have or miss, with the shape and size and look of our bodies, and spurred on at every turn by a sensory education that trains us to think and feel and act as if we were minds living in bodies. If our bodies defy control, what will become of us?

When we shift to the perspective of bodily becoming, however, these apparent “failures” appear in a new light: offering proof that our mind over body strategies for navigating our relationship to food are not giving us what we want.

How so? The movements we are making are making us. From this perspective, the apparent resistance of our bodies to diet or exercise is what we are creating. This resistance is not an unfortunate obstacle we encounter on our path to pleasure; it is what our practices are generating in us. We are creating ourselves into people who are addicted to diets, anxious about our fitness, and arduously at war with ourselves in the name of our own well being. The movements we are making as we attempt to reduce our energy intake or increase output are creating us into people who sense and respond to our desires with suspicion and dread—as if they were alien creatures, rather than who we are. We learn to believe that we can and should hold this stance over and against our desires for food, and feel guilty when we cannot. Yet doing so is like trying to hold our breath. If we go too long, we black out. Our bodies take over and we breathe—or eat—again.

The problem, then, is not that our bodies lie beyond our control. The problem is that we are creating a relationship with ourselves in which our bodies feel like they are out of control. We act as if they are, failing to cultivate their potential to guide us in eating in ways that will nourish our health and well being.

From the perspective of bodily becoming, our desires for food are us. They are who we are. And how we sense and respond to these desires, whether we move with or against them, creates us as the bodily selves we are.

We are born needing to eat, but not knowing how. The genetic potential is there, but not its expression. We know enough to suck and swallow, but not much more. Our sensations of pleasure and pain guide us in popping in and spitting out. Over time, as we move towards what gives us the pleasure of being nourished and away from what doesn’t, we create and become the patterns of sensation and response that focus and refine what it is we want. We not only learn what to desire, we also learn how to sense and respond to our desire when it wells in us.

It is this learning process that scientific methods have yet to map or measure. It is this learning process that has proven exceedingly vulnerable to the myths of our desire-denying diet culture. And it is this learning process that we can choose to participate in consciously by cultivating our sensory awareness. As we do, we can shift our experience of our desire for food, strengthen its powers of discernment, and learn to follow the arc of our pleasure to a sense of enough.
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It took a while, but the lived experience of practicing yoga finally won out. Yoga, I realized, doesn’t just exercise my muscles. Its value is much greater. Moving in and out of the yoga postures exercises a sense of myself that counters my mind over body training—and the voice that screams "burn calories!" My movement is making me (Feb. 13).

My experience of my desire for food shifts. Suddenly it is no longer a question of struggling to control calories in and out. It is a question of learning to honor and trust the rhythms of my hunger, the subtleties in my experiences of eating. Then I know too what good any "exercise" can be: an opportunity to move, to breathe, to open our senses, and to drop in to what our bodies know about how, when, and what to eat. This wisdom is the best resource we have in finding the satisfaction we seek.

Next week: what we desire from food, and why we can and should develop our capacity to trust it.

Breathing to Move 3: Fire

As much as I love it, I don’t walk everyday. I can’t. As much as I need to breathe myself into this time and place and open to the shock of its relentless creativity, I need something else too, and just as regularly. I need to sink my awareness as deeply as I can within the folds of my sensory self and discover what this beating, bodily becoming can know within.

For this I do yoga.

The postures of hatha yoga represent a science, thousands of years in the making, of bodily movement. It may seem ironic to say so. A pose is a pose, still and quiet. Yet each pose systematically massages the pathways through which energy moves through our bodily selves—food, water, air, electricity, and awareness. As the poses draw our attention to organs and systems, tissues and skins, bones, muscles and nerves, we practice releasing into the flow of the movements that are making us. We ignite a fire within.

Really?

It begins with the breath. To enter a pose, you breathe your bodily self into a bend or stretch, balance or twist. The shape tugs at your awareness, pulling your sense of self into the bodily form of the pose. The pressure in your hip, the squeeze in your back muscles, the unbuckling of a hamstring trains your focus on these places—as points strung along a possible trajectory of movement.

As a felt sense of the pose comes into view, you notice too whatever is preventing you from feeling ease in the pose. Your breath finds such places when it stops at them, unable to pass through. While the pain may be physical, it is often not, infused with emotional hues as well. It is not that there is some abstract connection between emotional states and bodily parts. Rather every sting you have ever felt, every zoom of excitement, every flash of fear, registers in you. Whenever you cringe, shrink, freeze, flail, or brace yourself for the worst, your bodily self remembers those shapes—patterns of sensation and response. Over time, you become them, they become you. Rigid. Unmoving. Your enduring habits.

Moving through the postures, you find such frozen places. The pose may trigger feeling of frustrating at your limitations, doubt in your ability to do what you want. Distrust of your bodies, your desires, your self comes rushing in—the patterns you mobilize in response to challenges in life.

So too, moving through the poses, you find your freedom. It is the freedom alive in your capacity to drop into the creative flow of your own sensory existence, and make new patterns of sensing and responding. Each pose invites you not only to assume the pose but guides your attention towards the source energy and strength, coordination and balance you need to sustain it. The arc and fold and reach of these poses points your awareness into the bowl of the pelvis, the cradle of our vital energy, roughly four fingers below the belly button.

Here, at the root of our spines, is where the fire of life ignites and burns. It is the fire that rises through you, animating your senses, feelings, thoughts, and actions. It warms skin and soul; it radiates through pores and projects.

As you learn to breathe into this fire, fanning its flames, you fuel an ever-expanding array of sensory creativity. Your senses open beyond whatever pain you are feeling. You can imagine alternative ways of being in the posture—alterative pathways for the energy to flow through you. Alternative arrangements of limb and thought appear in your opened awareness, and you move with them. Over time, with practice, effort-full places release into the stronger, enabling flow of your creative bodily self.

After 22 years practicing yoga, through books and performances, pregnancies and nursing, often surrounded by kids climbing on and over and under me, I am constantly amazed. Every time I practice, I discover something new. Every time. A span of awareness, an arc of intention, dawns in my sensory self and floods me with joy. I touch the places that hurt, gently, and release into the movement that is making me.

No, I can’t do every pose perfectly. Far from it! But I am better able to sense what that pose has to teach me today, about myself, about where I am, about how the movements I am making are making me, about how to move in ways that will open me to the flow of enlivening life coursing through me.

The process is infinite. Ecstatic. What flows through, really, is love.

Action:

Fire breath: (Are you breathing?) Follow that breath into your heart, and through your heart to the places where you are touching the ground (see 1/29/08), to the surfaces where your skin dissolves into air (see 2/5/08). Feel your weight against the earth, your light oneness with space.

Now as you exhale, release all of the air out of your body. Empty yourself down to the very bottom of your belly. Push the air out for a second more. Wait in the emptiness until the urge to breathe opens you again.

Breathe all the way in and exhale again. This time, follow the breath out even further, sinking your awareness deeper into your internal cavity, the bowl of your pelvis. At that moment of greatest emptiness, push your diaphragm down and squeeze the muscles along the bottom of your pelvic floor up. In this pulled circle of muscular sensation, light a fire.

Release the effort. Take another breath in through your heart. As you exhale, activate that same muscular sphere, sending fuel to the burning fire. And again. Feel the fire blaze. Feel its vitality, your vitality, coming to life.

Breathe in again. This time, without contracting any muscles, activate a sense of them. Feel the strength and the length of the lower abdomen, its width and breadth and depth. Feel that fiery core rooted into the ground and warming the airy volume of your physical space.

Try this breath, with the earth and air breaths. Try it whatever you are doing--walking, driving, swimming, or doing yoga! What happens?

Next week, the final breath: water