We gathered at 7am.  I was the teacher.  It is the first anyone has seen me in public at that hour for eons.  The sun rose at about 5:45.  It is a clear day and there was a rainbow out the opposite window as the one last evening.

Beginning in swastikasana.  The feet are flexed and the shins are crossed so the legs are sort of in a box shape.  Everyone is sitting on a blanket or a block.  

Extend your arms out to the side and flex your wrists to open space between your shoulder blades and chest at the same time you connect the shoulder blades.  Place your flexed palms on the very tops of your thighs and press your femurs down.  Lift your ribs up.  Slip your hands on to your ribs and lift them up with your hands, more lift in the back than the front.

Then interlace your fingers and lift your arms over head.  Inhale and bend the elbows.  Bring your palms — still facing up — behind your head. Reach your elbows away from each other.  Exhale, arms up, Repeat 3x. 

The next time you bend your arms place your palms on the back of your head.  Inhale, lift the chest and face up.  Exhale, drop your chin and elbows, creating a stretch in the back of the neck and upper back.  Repeat 3 x.

The next time you inhale reach your arms up to the ceiling again.  Exhale, and bend the right, letting your right hand come to the floor, left arm overhead.  Then, bend your left arm, placing your left hand behind your head.  Inhale, and spin the chest up to the ceiling, exhale and drop the elbow, curling the chin down to the right diagonal.  Repeat 3x.

Final exhale, fold over your right leg on a diagonal.  One hand on either side of your right knee.  Let your head go.  Let your shoulders and elbows be heavy and soft.

Walk around to the center and fold over.  Roll up. Change the crossing of the legs and do the other side.

After the second side, stay folded over your legs.  Reach around behind you and interlace your fingers.  Lift your arms up — not from the hands but from the shoulders.  Sit up on in an inhale, with your arms as high up behind you as possible.  As you exhale, bend your elbows and place your two-handed fist on your right waist from behind.  Inhale, sit tall, exhale, twist to the left.  Maybe you can join your elbows together behind your back.

Inhale, center, extending the arms behind you, exhale, two-handed fist to the left waist and twist right.

Inhale, center, extending the arms behind you.  Exhale, release the arms and swing them around in front and hug yourself.  Shrug your shoulders and try to get your fingers inside your shoulder blades.  Drop your head and breathe here.

Lift your head and in the self-hug, circle your torso three times in each direction.  Let your head and neck go.

Back to center, keep your elbows crossed but lift your forearms, coming into garudasana arms. Inhale, lift the elbows and look up.  Exhale, drop the elbows into your body and round forward.  Repeat 3x.

Inhale garuda arms to shoulder height.  Keeping your shoulders even, lean your forearms to the right, then the left. Then keeping the elbows and wrists crossed, reach your fingers forward as if you could straighten your arms toward the floor.  

Uncross your arms, turn your palms up and place them on your thighs.  Close your eyes.  Sit quietly.

Repeat the second section of this stretch sequence.

Pranayama practice:

Being by palpating your ribs. Feel the bottom right rib and trace it all the way around to your back as far as you can.  Then the intercostal between that rib and the next one.  Do this with all your ribs and the muscles in between all the way to your armpits, and your collarbone.  Then walk your fingers down your sternum to the bottom left ribs and repeat this exercise on the left.  Come back down the sternum and place your fingertips on your sternum.  Close your eyes and breathe.  Notice if your sternum moves when you breathe.

Fold up two blankets in 4 layers of accordion fold.  Gradate the ends so they are like a ramp. Make the fringe end be away from you.  Sit on the floor in front of the ramp end and lie down.  Reach around behind you and tuck the end of the blanket under your neck just enough to make a small pillow.  You should be like a waterfall, forehead higher than chin higher than chest higher than belly higher than hips.  Legs are in savasana.  Arms are in savasana.

Begin to notice your breathing.  Can you direct your breath into your side ribs and let your sternum stay soft?  The sternum is like a valley and the two sides of your chest are small hills.  Let the valley stay low.  Breathe into the inside of the side ribs and if you feel any hardening or tightening in the inside of the side ribs, then you’ve gone far enough so just let go and exhale.  Do this for several minutes.  

Continue doing that but now we are adding another layer of interest and direction.  As you inhale, draw the breath in alongside the inner aspect of the nostril, the septum.  As you exhale, send the breath out along the inside of the outer curvy part of the nose.  The breath becomes circular.  How does this change your experience?  Your breath?  Your mind?  Your nerves?  Do this for several minutes.

Now, inhale fully and as you exhale, count.  However long your exhale was, make your inhale half as long.  Then repeat this, ie., exhale for 8 and inhale for 4.  Do this for several minutes.  Can you still maintain awareness of the soft valley of your sternum and the tidal quality of the inside side ribs, breathing ebbing and flowing?  Do this for several minutes.

Then let it all go and rest in savasana for several minutes.  Roll onto your right side and rest here.  Slowly sit up, letting your head be the last thing to come up.  Sit quietly on your blanket with your eyes closed.  Feel what it is like to be you…or perhaps not to be you.

OM OM OM

Margi invited me and Christie and Sarah for dinner last week.  Sarah didn’t feel well and had to go to Durham early the next morning to do the OM yoga tt there (which she liked doing, by the way – a great group of tt peeps this year!) and so we missed her.  But it was very fun and delicious.  She made a farmer’s market chicken because big chickens are too sad after seeing Food Inc., and she made a yummy salad and an amazing vegetable tart.  It was hard to control ourselves and not devour it all immediately.  Then we had cookies and homemade grapefuit sorbet.  YUMMMMMM!

This vegetable tart recipe can be found at dashandbella.blogspot.com

Then, we retired to the living room.  What did we talk about?  Everything and nothing.  Did we talk about yoga?  No, but Margi did yoga.  Restorative supta virasana supported by a bolster and Fin’s stuffed animals.

Who says a stuffed cat can't be used as a restorative yoga prop?

If you want to ring out the old and ring in the new in the deepest and widest way, come to the annual OM yoga New Year’s Eve class!  It is already over half full and will definitely sell out, as it does every year.   Make a reservation by calling OM yoga 212-254-9642 or go to the website, www.omyoga.com.

This year it will be taught by Joe and Edward.  They will gather everyone together for pranayama and meditation, then split up into separate studios for asana practice — this might turn into a 2,3, or 4 room affair depending on how many people come.  The more the merrier, but we don’t want to feel too squished on our mats so we do it like this.  Then after that, everyone gathers back together in the Earth studio for meditation.  This is great time to bring your non-yoga family and friends, too.  It is so great to be with your sangha on New Year’s Eve and you have plenty of time afterwards for…..whatever is your pleasure on this big night!

One of my students and a graduate of The Road to OM, Kendra, is also a 10th grade teacher.  She teaches yoga to her kids in Queens and so I invited her to bring them to OM yoga for a field trip and a yoga class in a real yoga studio.  They were so great!  When I walked into the studio, they started chanting, Cyndi Cyndi Cyndi.  They were super excited and their passion for yoga was amazing!

We talked about what it takes to hold a balance. They came up with breathing and focus. Yes! We called these our Tools for Concentration.

Kendra did a great job teaching these guys and she helped me by assisting and doing skillful adjustments.

Of course, they love doing arm balances. Some of the boys can even go from crow pose right up into handstand. I demonstrated crow into chadarunga and they loved that!

They were willing to try everything.

They dropped right into pranayama and meditation. No problem. No resistance. Amazing.

Even though I had a really bad cold all last week and had a hard time getting out of bed this morning, it was a real pleasure and inspiration to work with these kids.  I was so impressed with their good hearts and open faces.  So much sweet nature right out there.  I was surprised by that, actually.  I can’t wait to see them again and have invited Kendra to bring her kids to OM yoga again.  Thanks, kids!

Last week was a week from hell situation.  Not only did my mom fall and cut her eyebrow, requiring stitches and a long visit to the emergency room, but little Leroy Brown has a complete body rash.  His little eyes and nose and ears and tummy and everything is red.  So I’ve been to the vet and the hospital and the nurse and somehow that wasn’t all but its enough to discuss in these pages.  And now that that week is over I can remember that there were some good parts, too.  Here they are:

OM yoga Knit Along!! Becca, Sarah, Barbara and Sybil and me -- what fun we had. We just love, love, love knitting. Next one is Tuesday, Dec. 15.

The next day I had to get up early and catch a train up to Garrison Institute.  I dragged Christie Clark along with me because we were invited to be part of a panel of experts who are creating a Wellness Program for Garrison.  The program will provide yoga and meditation nationally for Social Workers in the area of Domestic Violence who get Vicarious Trauma from their work.  Internationally we are building a similar program that will be for humanitarian and human rights workers who are both front line traumatized and have vicarious trauma.  So it was an amazing group of people, including Deborah Rozelle and Sharon Salzburg and others and an intense day.  Christie and I were honored to be part of this important work.

This was our morning train conductor and I just thought she was so cute, especially for a train conductor, that I had to take her picture.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday David and I taught Yoga Body Buddha Mind at OM yoga.  

Exsqueeze me for saying so, but I think David is an amazing dharma teacher. He has a huge set of skillful means for working with individuals and he never phones it in.

The workshop was part of the OM yoga Teacher Training Weekend Warrior Program and we had teacher trainees from all around the world here.

This is Maya, from OM yoga tt in Japan and me and Nicole, from OM yoga tt in Cleveland, OH. We all took a great yoga class from Edward. He took this blurry picture -- I guess he was naturally high from teaching.

These were some of the happy highlights of an otherwise tough week.  One  of those weeks where the obstacles just kept coming and I thought to myself, “I am in over my head.  I do not have the skills to deal with this.”  But, in the midst of it all, I kept doing my yoga and meditation practice.  And that makes a HUGE difference.  It shifts things.  It reminds me of impermanence.  As Margi would say, Sandcastles.  My whole hearted resolve to remain committed to my practice has kept me in good stead.

Dave and I are back at Kripalu for our annual November Yoga Body Buddha Mind weekend.  Wouldn’t you think that we would get sick of teaching this material?  Well, we don’t!  It is different every time because the group is different every time and we are different every time.  There are so many open hearted, curious, smart people with us this weekend and a large percentage of them are experienced yogis and experienced meditators.  Ten years ago it would have been the opposite percentage.  Pretty cool to see how much yoga and meditation has infiltrated our culture.

Getting twisted help unknot our energy body. Not to mention the detox bennies.

With a big group you just have to get up on the little platform thing so everybody can see you but I am always afraid I will fall off! Maybe some yoga teachers are more stationary than me, but my sequencing is spatially oriented and there is not enough room on this box. Whatever. It works okay for baddhakonasana.

When you lift your arms does your neck vanish? Does your chest sink? Is it super effortful? Then open them out into a V for vinyasa!

This is Jill, one of the many smart and groovy YBBM yogis and yoginis this weekend.

This is Kripalu's new yoga room which is gorgeous. Lots and lots of props, too! Thanks, Kripalu.

This is the view from our room up on the top of the hill. Barren winter beauty.

We are so honored.  An excerpt of a piece Dave and I wrote for The Shambhala Sun has been included in the current issue.  The section is called For 30 Years the Best of Buddhism in America: Meditation and our bit is called “Not Too Tight, Not Too Loose.”  Check it out, page 67.  Some of others included are Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche, Tulku Tondup, Sharon Salburg, and Thich Nhat Hanh.  As I said, we are so honored.

Last weekend at Blue Point Yoga in Durham, NC — what fun!  It is third annual OM yoga teacher training program and each year the students get better and better.  I have to think it has something to do with the fact that many of the Blue Point teachers are now OM yoga trained and are teaching OM yoga classes right there at Blue Point.  Anyway, the southerners really know how to host people and we had a lovely time.

Moving through spine through curling and arching, as if it was a walking meditation up and down each vertebrae.

Mindfulness of toe, of alignment, of how the foot sets up the rest of the body. I always start adjustments from the ground up.

As of yesterday I am signed with Amy Hertz at Dutton for my next book.  My great agent, Stephanie Tade, worked hard to get me a good deal with the right person and I was very fortunate to have several excellent offers.  I am happy to be back with Amy, who was also the editor for Yoga Body Buddha Mind.  The new book is not about yoga, stay tuned for more details. 

In the meantime, I was invited to be on a panel discussion at a very well attended book signing at Barnes and Noble on Monday.  It was a new book called Be the Change by Ed and Deb Shapiro.  I was a contributor to the book and sat on the panel between Robert Thurman and Andrew Cohen, along with Ellen Burstyn, Linus from Law & Order and Mark Matousek.  And Ed and Deb, of course.  It was quite a lively evening!