Blog – Page 38 – Integral Yoga San Francisco

Yoga’s Role in Opening Up and Healing my Intergenerational Trauma

by Saeeda Hafiz

The day I understood that I was a spiritual being who had selected the body of an African American woman to have this experience in this life at this time, I was deeply empowered to participate in the healing process of my present lifetime trauma and my intergenerational trauma.

This revelation started when I began practicing a holistic yogic lifestyle.

It was January 1990. I was periodically adding whole-food dishes to my diet and ready to incorporate something called yoga to my routine. I had always wanted to try yoga in college. I didn’t really know what it was, but I was curious; it seemed peaceful.

The yoga class I signed up for started at 9:00 a.m. on a Sunday. The very first position was a resting pose called Savasana. I lay on my back, legs apart, breathing. We did leg lifts to warm up, followed by a series of standing poses. Quickly, I noticed that I was the only one who could not hold the yoga poses for the instructed length of time.

I stared at my crestfallen face in the studio mirror and watched myself struggle, lose my balance, and have to release a pose before everyone else.

I felt weak while everyone else seemed fine. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed it earlier but looking around the room, I realized I was the only African-American student in class, and everyone was either double or triple my age. I was pretty sure I didn’t belong.

“Watch me first,” the instructor said, interrupting my daydream. She held both arms straight out in front of her, and began to lower, bending her knees. She looked like a human chair. “We will use the Chair Pose to transition into our next asana.” We all followed her lead, listening to our knees crack on the way down. With our arms out in front, balancing on our tippy toes, we all looked like a row of chairs. The ball of my foot and my toes started to hurt from the pressure. I was happy when she said, “Place your hands on the floor and extend your legs, one at a time, and sit L-shaped.” Again, we followed her lead. I felt my toes tingling.

“Inhale, lift your arms out to the side and then up. Next, exhale. Extend your arms toward your toes and hold your hands anywhere along your legs. Go to a point of a stretch, not strain. This is the Forward Bend pose.”

Wow. I was touching my toes. This stretch felt good. I felt good. Finally, a pose I could rest in. I wasn’t coughing or struggling. I kept on breathing and holding. For the first time since I was a kid, I was enjoying myself as my body and breath opened up. But, most of all, folding forward released something that allowed me to relax, and to surrender.

“You’ll be teaching this one day,” I heard a voice say. I lifted my head slightly and looked around. No one was speaking to me. In fact, no one was talking at all. Then I heard it again. “You’ll be teaching this one day, and get closer to your grandfather.” I stayed in the pose. My head was down and I didn’t dare move. My breathing was slow, but many thoughts raced across my mind. “Am I going crazy? Do I have schizophrenia? Mental illness might run in my family, too. What’s happening to me?”

Weeks later, I followed the instructions from the audible voice telling me, “… get closer to your grandfather.” It was a bit confusing because I had every reason to want to keep a casual distance from my grandfather.

My first step in developing a relationship with my grandfather was to visit him every few weeks, if not every weekend. During this time, I would catch myself thinking, what am I supposed to learn by getting closer to my grandfather? This is still the man who beat Grandma. Isn’t it? When visiting him, I couldn’t help but think back to the day he evicted us from our home due to a disagreement between him and my mother.

This was always on my mind when I visited Grandad, but it didn’t stop me from creating a new relationship with him.

His house was like a time capsule. We sat in his 10’ by 10’ living room and listened to the Pirates playing the Dodgers on his transistor radio. Then he would tell me the story about why he supported the Dodgers over the Pirates. I never grew tired of my black history moments with him. The house still had a Dodgers’ Jackie Robinson souvenir button hanging from a poster of Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Bobby Kennedy.

One weekend, I asked him more questions about his childhood. He explained to me how he moved from McCormick, South Carolina, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He and his older brother George jumped on different boxcars to make their way north. But what he said next sounded as if it was out of a Mark Twain novel: George was accused of murdering a white man, but he didn’t do it, so we had to leave. He explained how they were going to kill George if they didn’t get out of town fast. His voice faded as he mumbled, We were only teenagers.

When I listened to my grandfather, I was part his granddaughter and part historian understanding the bigger plight of the African American in the United States. When we sat and just talked about his life, I was not mad, but understanding. I understood that we were all victims of victims.

Processing the plight of a black person in America, and having been practicing yoga for about eight months, there was only one place where I could fully trust life. It was at the end of a Hatha Yoga class, in the relaxation pose called Savasana. I didn’t have to be anything to anyone. I just was.

At the same time, I was both everything and nothing at all. I expanded outside of myself while simultaneously disappearing altogether. I was free. And every time I entered a class drenched from life, past and present, I would leave class feeling free because I just experienced a space where the truth of who I was could live without the intergenerational family shame. Every time I would leave class knowing that I was a spirit who has chosen to incarnate into this world as a black woman and role model of how to heal and love this life.

Please join me for a workshop on healing intergenerational trauma with yoga on Saturday, May 15 from 11:00am-1pm PDT. Click HERE for details and registration.

Saeeda Hafiz is a yoga teacher and wellness expert with certifications from the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centers and the Natural Gourmet Institute. As a holistic health educator with the San Francisco Unified School District, she focuses on sharing her 30+ years of knowledge in physical and mental wellness with diverse groups. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. saeedahafiz.com

Sevika Ford2021-05-09T07:22:16-07:00May 9th, 2021|

A Spiritual Perspective on Vaccine Safety and Science

by Katharine Bierce

The Buddha said he taught about suffering and the end of suffering. If there’s one thing (OK, or three things) we’ve all learned from the coronavirus pandemic, it is the truth of suffering, interconnectedness, and impermanence.

I am a yoga teacher, a Reiki practitioner, and an enthusiast of qigong, acupuncture, and “alternative” healing methods. And, I get my yearly flu shot, and am getting the COVID-19 vaccine and I encourage everyone to do so. Here’s why.

When you have a chance to reduce suffering, do it

As Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra I.33 says:

Maitri Karuna Muditopeksanam Sukha Duhka Punyapunya Visayanam Bhavantas Citta Prasadanam.

This mentions the four divine abodes of the heart, the Brahma Viharas, or compassion, loving-kindness, appreciative joy, and equanimity.

One of my favorite translations of this sutra comes from T.K.V. Desikachar, who studied with the grandfather of modern yoga, Krishnamacharya. Desikachar explains thus in his book The Heart of Yoga:

“In daily life we see people who are happier than we are, people who are less happy. Some may be doing praiseworthy things and others causing problems. Whatever may be our usual attitude toward such people and their actions, if we can be pleased with others who are happier than ourselves, compassionate towards those who are unhappy, joyful with those doing praiseworthy things, and remain undisturbed by the errors of others, our mind will be very tranquil.”

In this post, I want to focus on compassion. Cultivating compassion towards those who are suffering is thus an ancient yogic idea. But, compassion isn’t just a feeling – it’s a motivation for action to alleviate suffering. That distinguishes compassion from empathy, which is just feeling the feelings of others.

As you free yourself from suffering, you have more opportunities to help others

One of the best motivations to practice meditation, yoga, or any spiritual discipline is to be of service to others. Why? Because even if you have a million dollar condo in a nice neighborhood, if there are still homeless people around who are suffering, you share that suffering. As humans, we are social animals, and it is a natural response to want to help others who are suffering. If we close our minds and hearts to the suffering of others, we are shutting down what it means to be fully human. Spiritual practice gives us the technology to free our hearts and minds so we can get out of our own way, and more effectively be helpful in tough situations.

Science is methodical, like training the mind in meditation

The scientific method is one of the best ways we have to create new knowledge in a systematic way. A scientific experiment using the scientific method starts with a question. That question provokes some initial research into the area, and then the scientist formulates a hypothesis: something that can be falsified or supported by data. The scientist designs an experiment to gather data, then analyzes the data, reports the findings or conclusions (often in a published article that is reviewed by other scientists who try to find problems with it). The process continues iteratively – the end results of one experiment can be the beginning of an idea for another experiment.

In meditation, such as shamatha-vipassana practice, we systematically bring the mind back to an object (shamatha) to calm the mind, and then use the calmer, more collected, stabilized, unified mind as a way to look into the nature of our experience more closely (vipassana). The book The Mind Illuminated is one example of a meditation manual that outlines how to train the mind first by stabilizing it and then using that collected, unified mind to examine reality in a new way, like building and then using a microscope to look at small organisms.

What is a randomized controlled trial?

The vaccines against COVID-19 were tested in randomized, controlled trials, with tens of thousands of people, and shown to be effective in fighting this deadly disease. A randomized, controlled trial means that the experimenter randomly assigns people to get the vaccine or a placebo (a different flu vaccine or a different shot, or “control”) to compare if the real vaccine is effective, rather than someone just thinking they got the vaccine (the placebo). More people in the control group became sick with COVID-19. This number was large enough to show mathematically that the difference wasn’t a coincidence. The vaccine had prevented illness. There were also three trial phases to test safety, efficacy, and then a large-scale trial, followed by post-approval surveillance to see if any issues cropped up. If you want to nerd out on the details, here’s the New England Journal of Medicine published article on the Pfizer mRNA vaccine.

Doing science is hard work; it’s not about the money

In high school, I had the opportunity to work in a chemical engineering lab as an intern. I was at Tufts University for a summer, helping with research on gold and cerium oxide nanoparticles in the water-gas shift reaction. I won’t nerd out on the details here, but the basic area is related to the same kinds of things – catalysts – that turn toxic exhaust from your car’s tailpipe into less toxic stuff. Doing science was painstakingly slow, and could happen at odd hours. Some things had to happen at very precise times, and other things took a long time. The PhD student I worked with would frequently spend weekends in the lab. It can be hard to have a social life when one’s schedule is dictated by how long chemical reactions take and when the samples are ready for testing.

I also know at least one person who did science in a not-very-well-paying field. In their journey to become a PhD and then a full time scientist with a job, at one point they were on food stamps – they were paid that little. Scientists care about seva, or service, too, to help others. If you think science isn’t a spiritual practice, consider the sacrifices that scientists make to create breakthroughs that save lives. The main points here are: Scientists don’t do science for the money (compared to, say, investment banking), and a great deal of thought and effort goes into science – such as making vaccines.

When you find something that alleviates suffering, do it

Back to the Buddha. As you may know from the story of his life, he tried pretty much every technique that was available in ancient India to try to find awakening. He tried ascetic practices, fasting, abandoning his family to focus on his practice, all kinds of stuff, but none of it worked. When he found awakening, initially he was hesitant to teach because he thought no one would understand him. Thankfully, he ultimately taught the methods that worked for alleviating suffering for forty years after his awakening. Today, modern science is also demonstrating the benefits of meditation practice: remember that the Dalai Lama is a fan of science, and there are numerous studies putting monks or long-term meditators in MRI machines and seeing how their brains are different than non-meditators in many helpful ways.

The Buddha found liberation from suffering, and science can enable freedom from suffering, too. COVID-19 is a deadly virus that has killed nearly three million people globally as of this writing. Anything that can help reduce deaths and keep people out of the hospital is something to celebrate, even if it’s imperfect or has some side effects for a few hours or days.

Here’s a fun cartoon that explains how the COVID-19 vaccine works, simply, with some humor (click to enlarge):

cartoon by Emily Watters M.D. (shared here with permission)

For all these reasons, please: when you or your loved ones have the chance to get vaccinated against now-preventable diseases like polio, mumps, rubella, and now COVID-19, don’t wait – vaccinate!

GET THE VACCINE

Katharine first learned about meditation at an event with free food during college in Chicago in 2009. After attending classes with Shambhala, she started an almost-daily practice in 2012 while working in consulting in New York City. Her influences include Nikki Mirghafori, Pema Chödrön, Vipassana in the style of S.N. Goenka, Tucker Peck, Culadasa, Jeremy Graves, The Mind Illuminated, Rev. angel Kyodo williams, somatic meditation with Neil McKinlay and Norman Elizondo, and the insight meditation teachers at Spirit Rock. In March 2020, she completed a month-long meditation retreat, which is her seventh retreat of a week or more. Katharine works full time in technology marketing at a Fortune 100 company in San Francisco and also teaches yoga on evenings and weekends with Business Casual Yoga.

Sevika Ford2021-05-06T08:55:00-07:00May 5th, 2021|Tags: Buddhism, Yoga Sutras of Patanjali|

Honoring the Divine Feminine

by Swami Ramananda

At a recent Earth Day event that was held at the Integral Yoga Institute in San Francisco, we honored Mother Earth with prayers, expressions of gratitude, and a puja, as we committed ourselves to restoring the earth. Many countries celebrate Mother’s Day in the month of May, so this is a wonderful time to reflect and keep our hearts focused on honoring the mother—both our mother figures and the energies, virtues, and lessons of the Divine Feminine.

The Divine Feminine refers to the creative energies that bring Spirit into expression and all the manifestations of Spirit into form. Honoring it need not imply worshipping a Hindu goddess with six arms; it can be as simple as appreciating the natural beauty around us and as practical as planting a backyard garden.

Working cooperatively with the earth in this way, caring for the soil, and sharing its abundance is a beautiful way to honor Mother Earth and nourish each other. Likewise, we honor the earth by caring for our natural environment, recycling, preventing waste and pollution, and supporting green energy.

Spending time in nature can be deeply healing. Being in contact with the earth, such as walking barefoot or lying in the grass grounds us, relieves tension, and alleviates stress. We often talk about being in nature as if we are separate from it. Our bodies are a part of nature and caring for them—seeing them as temples of the Spirit within—is also a way of showing reverence. This doesn’t mean obsessing over the superficial look of the body, but nourishing it with proper food and rest, and respecting its needs with our posture and breathing.

Our female energies are essentially creative, giving birth to life and nourishing growth with caring and protection. This creative power exists in each of us and we give expression to it through art, music, and writing. But even starting a business, setting up a home, teaching a Yoga class, or cooking for friends gives expression to this potent energy. We honor these energies by giving ourselves time to be creative in whatever ways move us.

Yet another way of relating to the feminine aspect is the image of a Divine Mother. Many female saints and deities are role models of great virtue or a personification of spiritual qualities that inspire us to emulate them and seek their guidance. By acknowledging a spiritual presence beyond the ego-mind and its limited ideas, we humble ourselves and open our hearts to receive a grace that is always present. Praying this way, or invoking the Divine Mother through a ritual like puja, can be a powerful way to access an inner strength and rise above selfish thinking by feeling our connection to a Higher Power.

An obvious way of honoring the Divine Feminine is to honor our own mothers. Peoples around the world follow the tradition of celebrating Mother’s Day often by offering gifts of appreciation to their biological mothers, or anyone who has been a mother figure in their lives. Most of us have someone who has mothered us: feeding and protecting us, nourishing our development, supporting us through hard times, and loving us despite our mistakes. Acknowledging, with gratitude, all we have received opens our hearts and reminds us of the importance of the natural feminine propensity to nourish others.

Our modern culture places so much importance on science and technology, often with a world-view based primarily on ideas that can be tested with empirical observation. A sole emphasis on this world-view can cause us to feel separated from our natural interconnection with each other and the very creation we dwell in. It can also contribute to an imbalance that may be at the root of many of the problems we now face. Honoring the Divine Feminine can help us find balance and experience ourselves as part of the whole. This shift will enable us to see with a more global vision and may help solve the problems that torment a world torn from this holistic perspective.

Swami Ramananda is the Executive Director of the Integral Yoga Institute in San Francisco and a greatly respected senior teacher in the Integral Yoga tradition, who has been practicing Yoga for over 45 years. Ramananda offers practical methods of integrating the timeless teachings and practices of Yoga into daily life, and transforming the painful aspects of human experience into steps toward realizing one’s full potential.
He leads beginner, intermediate and advanced level Yoga teacher training programs in San Francisco, and offers a variety of programs in many locations in the U.S., Europe and South America. Ramananda co-developed the Stress Management Teacher Training program with Swami Vidyananda, has trained many teachers to bring Yoga into corporate, hospital and medical settings, and has taught mind/body wellness programs in many locations. He is a certified Yoga therapist and founding board member of the Yoga Alliance, a national registry that supports and promotes yoga teachers as professionals. He is a co-founder of The Spiritual Action Initiative (SAI) which brings together individuals committed to working for social justice for all beings and for the care and healing of our natural world. His warmth, wisdom and sense of humor have endeared him to many.

Sevika Ford2021-05-02T18:44:01-07:00May 2nd, 2021|

The Precious Treasure of Freedom

by Swami Vimalananda

“…It offers what the wise crave—
The priceless treasure of Freedom.”

-Hafiz

We all want freedom: freedom from hunger, freedom from poverty, freedom from tyranny, freedom from discrimination, freedom from oppression, freedom from harm, both physical and mental.

We join movements, we fight, we argue, we attempt good legislation, we become educated, we labor, we scheme. We do whatever we feel is necessary for us and others to survive and prosper in this world.

The problem though, is after we obtain the level of prosperity that we think is necessary for comfort, we still have our old negative thoughts. We discover that even though we might temporarily feel less stress and have more luxuries, we are stuck with our old self-image.

I was a poor kid, and decided I wasn’t going to live in poverty. I decided that an education, good job, a loving husband, and a house in the suburbs was the way to my happiness. However, after I received an education, had a good job, married, had three kids, and a house in the burbs, I still had a negative self-image and felt unloved. I very clearly remember looking out our picture window and saying to myself, “Is this all there is?”

Even though I was physically secure, I still was very poverty stricken, emotionally and mentally. I was happy or sad, or angry because of other people’s opinions of me. When I received praise, I doubted its sincerity or felt that it was fleeting and unreliable. But I was still very willing to compromise my integrity for a crumb of attention. At the same time, I felt very lonely and very dependent.

It was years before I realized how the process of meditation allows us to see how our thoughts reinforce our own belief system. The thoughts are so frequent that only snippets need to be conscious for us to reinforce them. I based most of my life decisions on these thoughts, organized my perceptions of life, and reinforced these perceptions over and over again. My most frequent thought was, “I don’t think anyone loves me.”

Even after years on the yogic path, some of those old thoughts and misperceptions are so strong that they still call out to me.

The last time I saw my beloved Sri Gurudev, I bowed at his feet and looked up to him like a little girl asking for his approval, and he frowned and shook his head. It took me a while before I understood his message: that I am still looking for external approval.

But as the Patanjali Yoga Sutra states, “By the practice of the limbs of yoga, the impurities dwindle away and there dawns the light of wisdom leading to discriminative discernment.”

We can maintain calmness and equanimity in our daily lives by replacing the negative thoughts with the positive. The more inner directed that we are, the easier it becomes to practice selflessness and develop a pure heart. We can detach from the world’s agenda by touching the inner whole self more and more and surrendering to a higher power, thereby abiding in the great feeling of freedom.

One of my heroes, Admiral James Stockdale, a navy pilot at the time of the Vietnam war, exemplifies the ability to abide in freedom. He was imprisoned for eight years in the Hanoi Hilton prisoner of war camp after his plane was shot down. For five of those years, he was tortured. After he was released, Admiral Stockdale said that he was grateful for the experience. I actually heard him say that.

He discovered that even though his enemy could control his body, they couldn’t control his mind. He had the freedom to think his own thoughts and maintain and even grow in his selfhood.

What is freedom? It’s being free from the prison of our own minds and free from thinking we need other people’s approval — to know we are complete and one with the Divine. It’s sinking into our own hearts and connecting with our inner guide, feeling completely looked after, and knowing we are complete just the way we are, living in our true nature. It is a place of real fun.

It Cuts the Plow Reins
-by Hafiz

What does Purity do?
It cuts the plow reins.

It frees you from working and dining
In the mud.

It frees you from living behind
A big ox
That is always breaking wind.

What can Purity do, my dear?

It can lift your heart
On a rising, bucking Sun
That makes the soul hunger
To reach the roof of Creation,

It offers what the whole world wants—
Real Knowledge and Power.

It offers what the wise crave—
The priceless treasure of Freedom.

Pure Divine Love is no meek priest
Or tight banker.
It will smash all your windows
And only then throw in the holy gifts.

It will allow you to befriend
Life and light and sanity—

And not even mind waking
To another day.

It reveals the excitement of the Present
And the beauty of Precision.
It confers vitality and a sublime clarity

Until finally all the heart can do
Is burst open
With great love and laughter!

O Purity,
O dear Truth and Friend within me,
Why didn’t you tell me sooner
You could do all this—

Cut the reins of illusion,

So we can all
Just go wild
Loving God
And everyone all day!

Swami Vimalananda Ma, RYT500, is an Integral Yoga sannyasi – monk. She has been involved with Integral Yoga since 1971 and Director of the San Francisco Integral Yoga Institute from 1992-2011. She specializes in teaching yoga philosophy and spiritual counseling.

Sevika Ford2021-04-15T14:35:37-07:00April 15th, 2021|

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