T.B. Pasquale

Posts Tagged ‘life’

Yoga can be a wonderful personal practice–body, mind, and spirit.  Through asanas we can bend our body, stretch our muscles, and flex our physicality.  Internally we can learn to quiet the mind, decrease anxiety, and find inner calm and centeredness.  In the intangibles of spiritual connection we can find through space to breathe we find connection to something larger than the self, something part of a collective whole and a union that persists inside ourselves and out.  From this we can, if we choose, extend that unity further.  If we choose.

I am coming to the close of my teacher training, beginning my “Yoga for Trauma Survivors” class and planning forward working and preparing for a variety of upcoming talks on mind/body wellness, yoga for mental health, and complementary therapies at the NASW Conference in Florida, at hOMe yoga in Mahwah, New Jersey, and in a graduate elective at a university here in Southern Florida.  As I prepare to move out of this phase of my life, an intensive training phase, and into an intensive action phase I think of the extension and arms of yoga.  How far can yoga reach?  As far as your mind and metaphors can reach–and much further forward than I can stretch in forward bend.

Karma yoga, selfless service, and yoga as action is becoming more and more synonymous as yoga communities are taking the internal calm of mind that comes from meditation and a quiet graceful posture and using that clarity to effect change in the world around them.  Such figures as Seane Corn and her “Off the Mat and Into the World” campaign highlight the ways in which yoga and a well-known voice can be channeled to create change both on the mat and in the world at large.  But we also don’t need to have a voice that is known to say something of value.  Yoga can imbue us with a sense of strength, empowerment, grounding, and centering and these essential tools of being can be taken by any yogi or yogini and be tailored for wherever your heart and passions might lead you.

I wrote earlier this month about Swami Padma, of the Sivananda Center in San Francisco, and his work to bring yoga to inmates in the California Prison System.  This is just another example of one person’s passion creating a ripple effect, a focus on a cause that might otherwise be ignored, and monies and services put in place as a result.  Imagine what you could do taking a combination of your passions, creativity, yogic centeredness, and spirit for action and creating change in the world.  Whatever your passion is, wherever your voice takes you, you have the potential to effect change for a population or a cause that otherwise could have been ignored.  What you believe in matters.  What you fight for can make a difference.  Lending your voice, even if it is just the voice of one, can change the hearts and minds of many.  We all have the potential to create ripples of change in this world; even ripples that could extend farther and wider than your imagination can imagine.

Lately, as I extend and deepen my own yoga practice, center inward more in meditative moments, follow my passion and lend my voice to what I believe in the more it seems that voice and these words of mine seem to blossom and grow branches upon branches.  I am still not sure how far this will take me or how much I will be able to do but I am setting my sights on infinity and anything along the way, on my pursuit, amazing and beautiful things are happening.  Connections are being made, changes are happening almost organically, and the contagion that is my own passion seems to spread as I open my mouth, write my words, and purvey my dreams for what could be.

My aspirations reach as far as creating a nonprofit and learning institute that could bring complementary therapies and yoga for mental health to a variety of populations at low to no cost as well as train persons in the field of yoga, mental health, and complementary therapies how to integrate the two and be sensitive to the needs and issues of mental health populations.  I believe healing and the capacity to heal can emanate from all manner of creative and holistic approaches and in my own trauma healing yoga, contemplative practices, and animal-bond/relational experiences have been profound.  I want to extend these tools to anyone I can.  So for now I will speak anywhere I can on the matter, create programs wherever I have the option to, and hope for a future where I can reach past the branches of my own dreams into something even more profound than I could imagine.

What do you dream about?  What do your passions lie?  What would you do to effect change in the world you are in, the life you have, and using whatever skills or knowledge you have at your disposal?  It is amazing the well of talent and internal resources we all have.  Every person is the authority on something or passionate for something that might be ignored by everyone else.  Every voice matters!  How are you going to use yours?

I began this blog, once upon a warmish New Jersey summer, in aspirations of great daily feats and defeats being regailed on the page during an arduous but manageable 8 weeks in yoga school.  I am rounding the end of week four, reaching the halfway point of the program, and find that my prolific nature has been more than somewhat stunted by no sleep, 5am wake ups, less sleep, more 5 am wakeups, work, yoga homework, work, more homework, even less sleep, and always, always 5am wakeups!

I have learned an immense amount in a short period of time, about self, perspective, and as my yoga teacher says: “Attitude, attitude, attitude.”  And I cannot wait to relay and give full account of it in detail.  Every inspiring moment, and flickering insight–I want to share in it, revel in it, learn more in the writing of it.  I find, however, that most of my reflection time lately is done in the 20 minutes of silence during morning meditation, before chants, and when my mind is supposed to be silent but instead clamoring with thoughts and inspirations that never make it to the page because by 630am my brain has begun to switch into “Survive through the day” mode and all whimsy and revelling is lost in exhaustion. 

So, here I sit, at 8:20 EST, feeling like it’s 1am.  And feeling a bit like a marathoner that accidentally sprinted the first leg of the race, cramped, and is way behind the others…huffing and puffing and searching for the finish line but not quite seeing it yet.  I have nothing particularly insightful buzzing in my groggy mind and only the thoughts of all the “should haves” put off till tomorrow and “wish I coulds” temporarily on hold. 

This experience is certainly once in a lifetime and quite blissful even in the painful moments (which are a’plenty!).  But I fear, for today, I have little in the way of clarity and great inspiration and much in the way of sheep counting and daydreaming of nightdreaming. 

I am excited to say that my newly revamped website will be online at www.embodymentalhealth.com probably by week’s end!  It is in limbo while it is being renovated and made lovely by my wonderful graphic artist miss Sandra Busta of Pole to Pole Consulting.

I am also excited to preliminarily announce a new collaboration with the lovely Mindy and the gang over at Wish Studio who is also launching a revamped site this spring complete with virtual studio space!  I will be presenting an e-course over there; more info to come soon! 

ALL MY BEST TO EVERYONE OUT THERE STRUGGLING THROUGH THE POSSIBILITIES IN THE IMPOSSIBLE & REACHING FOR DREAMS AND WISHES (both conscious ones and slumbering ones)!

Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.

Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton, who also wrote the book of essays entitled No Man Is An Island, wrote with such clarity and certitude it is hard to argue with the above statement or the one in the title of his short stories.  I have often had a problem trying to defy both of his certainties in my life–living life in intensity rather than balance and in solitary defiance rather than union with all.  I have gotten better as I age, and learn, and read more of the wisdom of people like Merton, but somehow the roots of my old patterns seem to rear their ugly heads just when I think I am dissolving them.  Like in HEADSTANDS. 

Headstands are the symbolic and literal depiction of balance.  If you are out of balance you may be able to hide it in a shoulder stand or even a tree pose but somehow the headstand always knows.  And I am a flunkie of the headstand barometer of balance.  I fall, I flop, I roll out, and crumple up.  Fear, indecision, uncertainty, and lack of personal balance all come falling onto the floor with me and leave me feeling bare.  I am brutally aware of my faltering points in headstand, or rather not-in-headstand, in a way that somehow I can ignore in the world off the mat. 

But the headstand knows–and it towers over me in mockery of what I cannot yet do.  Let go enough to just give over to the unknown.  Find centeredness at my inner core unshakable even when the world topples on its head and flips upside down.  But I am working on it and I breathe and release and try again, lifting off the mat for a moment before crumbling down again. 

I may be floppy and fumbling and anything but graceful but I persist.  And one day, hopefully sooner than later, I will lift off with confidence and equilibrium–proving that even when the world flips 180 degrees I can stand firmly on my head and face it.

 HAVE A WONDEFUL, BALANCED , & CENTERED WEEKEND!