#cavuyoga

Where is Your Focus?

E.W. Shannon 9/29/20

Photo by: E. W. Shannon (c) 2020

I love Tree Pose (Vrikshasana). It looks so simple from the observer's vantage point, but once you're in it, the pose requires all your mental focus, it requires a special strength and softness as the sole of the foot is pressed into the inner thigh and the inner thigh presses back, and it requires the breath to be smooth. It's also the one pose that can change drastically for me from day to day. Somedays my toes are on the ground with my heel against my ankle, some days it's up on the calf, and somedays it's up on my inner thigh and I'm able to grow and sway my tree.

About a year ago a student of mine fell out of Tree Pose. We were outside by her pool on one of the first crisp mornings signaling the waning of summer's heat. I cued her into the pose, she took one complete breath, and she fell. While I was collecting her off the cool deck, I asked what had happened. She said she thought she was concentrating on a spot on the ground, but it ended up being a bug and when it moved, it pulled her off balance.

Think of how many 'bugs' pull our focus and take us off balance: social media, phones, politics, pandemics, etc. It's so easy to 'check' Facebook and find you've lost twenty minutes scrolling over inconsequential posts. And while I would never advocate for burying our heads in the sand and ignoring the problems of the world, we also must realize how little of an effect we have on some of these problems. We need to find our balance and, like in Tree Pose, we find our balance by finding our focus.

What will your focus be? How far out will it be? Is it a speck on the horizon or something much closer? Once you know what it is, write it down and place it someplace, or more than one place, you'll see every day to remind you. Say it out loud, let every cell in your body know its focus. The next time you become enraged over something you can't directly change, look over at what you wrote down and realign yourself. You can be aware of events happening and align your values to helping or hindering those events, but they can't become your sole (soul) focus.

The Heart of Plank

by: E. W. Shannon 10/12/20

I love when students tell me they can't do plank because they don't have a lot of upper body strength. Mentally I call BS while keeping a smile on my face. Most of my smile comes from remembering the three-minute plank already planned into my sequence.

To be fair, there are a few individuals who will need to come down to a forearm plank due to pre-existing wrist and shoulder issues. And sure, you might have wrist or shoulder aches while in plank, but those primarily stem from being in a static position laden with body weight. Think of the position we keep our wrists in while typing on a keyboard, plank puts those joints in the opposite position and adds weight; it's change, of course it's going to be uncomfortable. But why concentrate on the uncomfortable?

In fact, in most of life we tend to let 'uncomfortable' pull our attention. Things like the pandemic, this election decade we're in (oh wait, it only feels like a decade), money problems, other people's problems we take on, the past, the future, etc. Imagine your brain is a giant dry-erase board and you keep writing all the things, big or small, making you uncomfortable; eventually that board is going to be a mess. On top of being a mess, it's filled with a bunch of stuff not pertaining to your life in the present.

So, let’s start erasing. Like my students in plank, you can use the following tool to stop focusing on the uncomfortable. You don't have to be in plank, you can be sitting, lying down, if you're having a bad day at work you can even do it in the bathroom. (Just don't do it while driving.)

Close your eyes and start to concentrate on the smoothness of your breath and the beating of your heart. Once your breathing consists of long wave-like breaths (health permitting), turn your focus to your heart, specifically its movements. See if you can feel the front of your heart, the back of your heart, the top, the bottom, the right side, and the left side. Don't rush this, experience each side fully, savor the luxury of concentrating on yourself, try to discern what the heart is beating against, see if you can feel the different chambers moving.

Do this for at least three minutes, but you're more than welcome to make an entire meditation out of it. When you're done exploring your heart, take a deep breath and sigh it out, take another deep breath and sigh it out, and then open your eyes slowly.