Welcome to our new website! Mat Doyle at Heron Graphics (yup, just down the hall) has worked long and hard to make it beautiful to look at and easy to use, for both of us.Take a look around, and let me know what you think. I look forward to sharing thoughts here about the studio, the website, about our community, about yoga, about our experiences with all of it.  This is pretty new to me, and I am still learning my own way around the "back end" of the website, but I will do my best to keep everyone in the loop and look forward to fine tuning the website as time goes on. I'll see you on the mat!

How we come to yoga                                            6/1/10

I took my first yoga class in 1978, when I was fourteen. Elise Gellman took me to a class being offered in the rec center of her apartment complex; I was dating her son. This woman was the most spectacularly maternal person I have ever met, and not in a cloying, talk down to the young teenager kind of way. I adored her.  She was loving and kind and funny, and more than a little worried that her 18 year old son was involved with someone so young. Let's just say it called for a little extra mothering. I don't remember much about the class in a concrete way, but when I left I felt like the mucky cloud of teenage insecurity had been washed clean from my eyes.  I remember turning to Elise afterward and feeling actually startled by how different I felt. She beamed me a smile that shot right into my heart.

Aside from a few classes here and there, it was not until after college that I ventured back into a yoga studio with anything like commitment. What pulled me in this time was sheer desperation. Living in Chicago, I was trying to make it as an actor while waiting tables and taking on the occasional industrial film job or commercial. I loved the work and I loathed the audition process. I experienced levels of anxiety and panic that were paralyzing, and someone suggested yoga could help me gain control over my nervous system by controlling my breath. Perfect lure for a control freak. I quickly learned that deeply beyond the control aspect of the whole process, was the much deeper experience of letting go. And that, as they say, was that. There was not a class or practice in those first few years that I didn't flash back on Elise's beaming, loving smile, and when she died of breast cancer in 1997 or so, I was living in California, and she began "visiting" my practice again. I still think of her often and with love and gratitude.

Eventually I left theater. I think the turning point was when I dragged a dear friend and successful (and talented) stage actor to class with me, eager to share with her my discovery. Afterward, she turned to me and said something to the effect of: "I feel so polished, like all the rough edges have been smoothed away. But, I need those rough edges. I like my raggedness. I am a character actor and that edginess feeds my work." I chewed on that awhile and concluded at some point that my own rough edges fed me nothing but anxiety and misery and that I did not have the constitution to balance both. I wanted the smooth. I felt more alive and grounded than I ever had. I dove into my practice and my study of yoga, and eventually was invited to apprentice to teach with my teacher.

So, why in the world am I boring you with all the details of my earliest experiences with yoga? To this day, I have not encountered a bad "reason to do yoga." People find themselves in a yoga class for any number of reasons. The reasons we continue our practice of yoga change and evolve. The practice itself changes with us. Today, there are yoga classes at every gym, many work places, community centers. Back in the eighties, that wasn't the case. You had to find a dedicated studio....the "going to a class" felt much more removed from the everyday than yoga classes are now. But, even if your goal is purely physical, and you are jonesing for the workout aspect or even ambitious to "achieve" a certain pose, it is not my job or interest to judge. You are there to have the experience you have. For some people that is deeply spiritual, for some people it is a tonic for the mind, for others it is a form of emotional rescue. It is all good, it is all yoga, and I have a commitment to keeping Upper Valley Yoga a place where, regardless of your reason for being there, you feel welcomed the moment you step through the door, and you leave feeling better than when you came in.

Now, I will not be offended if you experienced bloggers out there care to drop me a line and tell me this is not what you want to read about! Believe me, I have been procrastinating on this particular corner of the website, wondering what should I say? What do people want to read about? Will anyone even read it? I finally decided just to start. This is my beginning. I hope you will add your own comments and your stories about coming to yoga, and I welcome ideas about what we can use this forum for.

See you on the mat
Leslie

The Edge
8/4/10

It is hot. Really hot. Some of you know I really actually love the heat, but there is no doubt that even while loving it, I struggle with the discomfort of sticky skin and sluggishness. If the outside temperature was always moderate and mild, wouldn't that make life better? Easier certainly. We live in a place where the temperature extremes are, well, extreme. We learn to live with discomfort, or we don't. We feel what we feel, or we struggle against it. In yoga, I have found that among the many other gifts I have received from this practice, I am learning to live in the moment of discomfort. Look at it. Resist for the moment the urge to fix it. I have had to learn what is productive discomfort, versus what could be harmful. But that too is a valuable lesson. We are bombarded in our daily lives with any number of ways to ease discomfort, to feel less. We rush to satisfy the mild pangs of hunger, or banish the discomfort of a headache brought on by too much time in front of a computer screen, or calm the turbulent belly brought on by any number of over indulgences. Pain is a real experience, and there are many times when it is necessary to go at it with drugs and/or alternative therapies, but could it be that we've dulled our ability to really feel, to stay with it and ride it out? To understand what it is pain or discomfort has to tell us? In any given moment in a yoga class, we are asked to sidle up that edge, to "play" the edge and understand the nature of the sensation, what it has to teach us, whether we respectfully back away from it, or gently and patiently stay with it through to the other side.  We ask students to "listen to your body" and know the difference between good pain and bad pain. It is not always so simple.  But, if you listen, pain and discomfort can be masterful teachers.

I encourage you, next time you practice at home or at the studio, to listen deeply when uncomfortable sensations, physical, emotional, mental, arise. Let your attention reside right at the center of those feelings. Don't judge or shut down, just watch. After some time has passed, maybe you will find you know yourself just a little more fully. Maybe not. I do know that I feel more connected to other people and more compassionate toward their suffering when I have spent some quality time with my own struggles. Yoga follows me off the mat and into my daily life in so many ways; this is one of many reasons I find that the practice of yoga continues, even after 21 years, to take me by surprise and inspire me to keep learning its endless lessons.

See you on the mat,
Leslie