A moment with Manuso

Kathleen Pringle, owner of Stillwater Yoga in Atlanta recently hosted a weekend workshop with Manuso Manos. Manuso holds one of only two advanced senior certifications given by B.K.S. Iyengar. He began studying with Iyengar when he was 24 years old, now about to celebrate his 60th birthday, he has almost 36 years of intense yoga practice under his belt.

Needless to say, that belt packs quite a punch in a workshop. Rumored to scream at folks to get them to listen, I have to admit I was a little nervous about attending. However, though brash with Northern zeal, the passion, knowledge, and compassion that he applies to his own practice and that of his students is so apparent, your mind and heart can't help but open up to him.

In the first pose, he took us on an adventure to unbelievable places just standing in Tadasana, mountain pose. The vehicle for the journey: our big toe. Simply attempting to extend our big toes without lifting them required an incredible amount of work throughout the whole body. It was extremely intense, and yet if someone was filming it, we probably looked as if we were hardly moving. That's the amazing thing about Iyengar Yoga.

If you have had the opportunity to take classes with Kathleen Pringle, you learn very quickly that in Iyengar Yoga every detail matters. The deeper into the details you get the more the whole thing changes. That goes for life as much as it does for yoga. As Socrates learned (and scientists are still learning), the more you know, the more you know you know nothing. Every day is a new beginning.

But like Manuso said in his workshop, for most adults that's a tough thing to master. We like to think we know things. We like to "show off" our knowledge. It makes us feel important. Children are open to change, so things like yoga come easy to them. Adults form habits even in our yoga poses, and if we allow it, our ego will just keep repeating the same habit (even though we think we are doing it what is being asked) until we get an injury or something that forces us to shift.

We have to train our brain to evolve. It's not really programmed to do that. As I've mentioned in my other articles, our brain likes patterns, and it loves to repeat them, thus the phrase "history is bound to repeat itself". Luckily, in Iyengar Yoga, we have great teachers to help us stay on track. In life, we usually have to get whopped in the head or heart a few times before we get it.

Manuso mentioned how Iyengar once said that every day is like a new experiment and some days it's a complete failure. In Iyengar's book Light on Life, he describes how change happens using the analogy of mounds of sand. The idea being that if you want to form a better habit you have to think of it as if you are building a new mound of sand. The simplified goal is to get the new habit mound bigger than the old habit mound. When you do that you have more pattern memory (sand) to apply to the new habit, and overtime the brainwaves basically wash away the old habit mound. The key is that effort must be applied towards the change. The only way to get there is to begin.

Sometimes just extending your big toe forward puts you on a new path. My work with Manuso did that. It was very intense. When he drew our attention to another area of our body, the required focus sent me deep into muscles and bones where some very old emotions were hiding. They were raw but nameless, formless, and unidentifiable at first. Thanks to the help and compassion of Kathleen Pringle I was able to identify them.

Yoga is such an incredible practice. I can say I've been training to have a kind of mind/body connection since I was five years old. Granted, I trained in ballet -- three to five days a week until I was 11, then up to eight hours a day or more until I was in my twenties. It wasn't until my late twenties that I found yoga, and even later that I really found my teachers. The difference between ballet and yoga are vast, and I am always comparing the two. While I am used to listening to a teacher, attempting as best as I can to do what is being asked of me, and trying not to assume I know anything, my weakness is listening to myself. Yoga forces you to draw your eyes and ears inward to listen and see yourself (Quantum Mechanics aside for now) in ways you haven't before.

I am constantly surprised at the depth of awareness I can gain, and once there realizing how much deeper I have to go. Before the workshop, I was thinking how I hadn't been able to take a summer vacation. Funny thing is I got one. I traveled far into the inner reaches of myself, even back in time, and when I returned I knew my world had shifted to a better place. It was just a moment with Manuso, but it was a moment that mattered.

For more information on Manuso see http://manouso.com/manouso.html or Stillwater Yoga go to http://www.stillyoga.com/

There are 96 Words for Love in Sanskrit

Sanskrit has ninety-six words for love; ancient Persian has eighty, Greek three, and English only one. This is indicative of the poverty of awareness or emphasis that we give to that tremendously important realm of feeling. Eskimos have thirty words for snow, because it is a life-and death matter to them to have exact information about the element they live with so intimately. If we had a vocabulary of thirty words for love ... we would immediately be richer and more intelligent in this human element so close to our heart. An Eskimo probably would die of clumsiness if he had only one word for snow; we are close to dying of loneliness because we have only one word for love. Of all the Western languages, English may be the most lacking when it come to feeling.- Robert A. Johnson, Jungian Psychologist [Fisher King, Page 6]

Words have fascinated me since I can remember. I was never one to be able to say what I felt. I always had to write it down or dance it. I still do. A big reason is the intricacy of my emotions never quite fits with the limited vocabulary that is on the tip of my tongue.

I'll never forget trying to teach a Japanese dancer to speak English on our subway rides home from classes in New York. We were both really young, but the experience opened a new portal of awareness for me about the complexity and limitations of our language. She would constantly ask why are there so many meanings for one word?

That was years ago, today those same words have even more meanings, especially if you include things like the Urban Dictionary. Our single word 'Love' must serve us for everything from the deep feelings we have towards someone we want to spend the rest of our life with to what psychologist, James Hillman described as humanity's feelings towards war. In his 2004 book, "A Terrible Love of War", he uses the term to describe an obsessive and all-consuming feeling much like we'd have for a soul mate.

What does that say about us? Is love in America confined to a single-word- one-dimensional-plane -- a plane with no room for subtleties, only polarities where experience darts back and forth from things like attraction to aversion, obsession to indifference, possession to loss? New York Times Op-Ed Columnist, David Brooks might say we take love to other dimensions through metaphor, like poet, Emily Barrett Browning, "...I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach [...]. In Brooks' April 11, 2011 article "Poetry for Everyday Life", he says we use about 10 metaphors for every 25 words. When we talk about relationships, he says we refer to health: That's a "healthy marriage". When we talk about an argument, he says we use war terms like turning your bedroom into a battleground.

Professor Robert Sapolsky's November 14, 2010, New York Times opinion blog, "This Is Your Brain on Metaphors", says the interesting thing about the brain is that it is wired to create literal and metaphorical versions of things. He also tells us the humiliating fact that the neurons in our brains are no better than those of a fruit fly - we just have a million to one more of them. The article goes into fascinating detail about how we trigger emotions, make decisions, and more through a patchwork of real and metaphorical stimuli. So, I encourage you to read it. For my purposes, I want to highlight an interesting question he brings up, "What are the consequences of the fact that evolution is a tinkerer and not an inventor, and has duct-taped metaphors and symbols to whichever pre-existing brain areas provided the closest fit?" If I purposely take that question out of context and apply it to the future of love in America, with our limited resources of words and symbols -- the consequences seem to progress into the pathetically repetitive and bland.

However, it's a whole new world now [I'm an eternal optimist], and what we have for our brain to tinker with is more than we think. We have quick-Internet-access to the archival myths and symbols of other cultures, along with richer languages like Sanskrit. I know the average American isn't known for taking leaps into linguistics; but imagine the opportunities - just think what we could do with 96 more words for love alone. We could revolutionize the art of expression and while we're at it maybe begin to reverse the hex from the tower of Babel. If we embrace the resources at hand, we can foster a more inventive evolution. Unifying the symbols, myths, language, and metaphors of other cultures to evolve our understanding, ability to communicate, and act on that multifaceted depth of feeling we called love.