10,000 hours

10,000 hours

This is a number that many experts use when referring to mastery. Research says it is not only the hours that are dedicated to the skill, but also the elapsed time in-between that makes a difference. In the book, "Genius within Us" author David Shenk says that after studying the process of mastery, ten years and ten thousand hours- no matter what the domain- seems to be the start of mastery. This equates to three hours a day. Just the other day a friend of mine who is a student was referring to a teacher at Empowered Yoga. He was commenting on her development as a teacher. I told him it is a simple equation, passion + practice = mastery. I told him that if the person is passionate and practice is steady then mastery can be achieved. The part of David Shenk's research that I find so important is the importance of lapsed time between dedicated study time. It is the digestion time that allows for the skill to soak into our being. I always tell our students in teacher training that the only thing they are lacking is teaching hours. Is there a skill you would like to master? If so are you putting in your time towards mastery?

The Sound of Your Life

"Out of silence emerges the sound of your life". During certain periods of my life, I work with quotes. This is one I am working with now. I am at the end of a 90 day challenge involving sitting daily in meditation so this quote is something easy to work with. Meditation is a pretty misunderstood word. Meditation and focus are synonymous. We meditate all of the time, especially when we drive. If you don't concentrate on the road you get in an accident or you get a ticket. In the process of seated meditation you concentrate on your body and breathing. You are concentrating on yourself. Seems a bit narcissistic at first yet all of this hinges on your intention. For most people, meditation is a process of relieving stress while experiencing joy and self discovery. The process is learning to listen inwardly to the sound of your life. Within this process you are taught the importance of being gentle and not judging yourself. Most of us can be hard on ourselves and judgmental. If you get quiet and sit still, what is your experience? For me spending time each day to be quiet and do nothing has become a profound practice. It has gotten me in touch with the sound of my life and the direction it is taking. We have beginner meditation every Friday in Wilmington if you would like to learn how to meditate.

Evolutionary Impulse by Andrew Cohen

Identifying with the Evolutionary Impulse

The evolutionary process is going somewhere. And now, maybe for the first time in history, we can decide with more conscious awareness where it's going. But our ability to do that depends entirely upon who we understand ourselves to be. What part of our self are we identifying with? Is it the personal psychological ego, or the conditioned habits and beliefs of our culturally created self-sense? Or is it the deeper, more authentic self that we discover when we awaken to the impulse to evolve? When we make the effort to identify more with the vertically moving energy of the impulse to evolve than with the horizontal pull of the personal ego and cultural self, everything changes. We transcend the enormous weight of our own predetermined conditioning and open ourselves up to the liberating experience of that part of the cosmos that is trying to evolve through us in every moment. We make ourselves available to that powerful telos, and when we do we become profoundly transformed. Now our attention has shifted from the conditioned past to the ever-ecstatic immediacy of the possible,here and now.

Andrew Cohen

How Yoga Works (Part III)

In my last post we looked at two different situations. The two situations were easy to write because I was writing about myself. I have been the ideal and I have been the not so ideal. As time moves along and I continue to practice yoga I become wiser and more aligned with what is skillful and what is unskillful action. Skillful promotes peace and unskillful acerbates confusion.

It is really important that we take a look at how our sleep, time management, nutrition and movement choices play a role in our life and how we think. We only practice Hatha yoga for 60-90 minutes on a mat and the average student shows up twice a week. At some point within our yoga practice the question, “how am I living?” becomes a dominant question. Do we carry an undernourished, over caffeinated, under-slept and stressed out body to the mat or are we taking care of ourselves?

I always say that at some point, something has got to go! The lifestyle has to change or you just have to quit coming to yoga because the pain of confronting your lifestyle over and over again becomes too exhausting. Unfortunately most people choose to discontinue the yoga. Only 10% of people who try yoga continue past one year.

Many people find this depressing but the fact is that it is more comfortable to stay stuck in habits and unconscious living. It's easy to make excuses about why you can not continue yoga. After fifteen years of teaching I have truly found a great appreciation of the understanding that as human beings we ourselves are our biggest obstacle.

This is one of the ways that yoga works. We learn to look at our own mind. How is our life manifesting within our body? This becomes the very ground upon which we can draw some conclusions. If we continue the way we are living what are the predictable mistakes and outcomes? If we courageously change some things where does that point the direction of our life? How does our courageous redirection alter the lives of those around us?

How Yoga Works (part two) Two Situations

Ideal situation

You wake with gentle zen chimes (this really makes a difference for me, available on itunes yet they also sell Zen alarm clocks) from a good night sleep where you were predominantly resting in theta and delta waves. You wake up with sufficient time to prepare for work. You get out of bed and are not rushing so you are calmly moving about your day and are now in alpha waves. If you drink caffeine you have a small dose of just one cup which will bring you into beta waves.

You move throughout your morning and enjoy a tempered drive to work listening to something that promotes relaxing. Throughout your work day you take momentary breaks to stand up and stretch your arms overhead (this severely disperses compressional forces on lower spine and increase blood flow promoting energy). It only takes 30 seconds to stand and stretch. This also helps reset your attention span.

You keep a glass of water next to your desk and drink water because you realize that dehydration is one of the easiest ways to misconstrue hungry and promote lower energy levels. You shift into beta waves as needed throughout the day yet maintain a constant foundation of alpha waves as you move through your tasks with great efficiency.

You practice mindful breathing throughout the day which helps you maintain a sense of calmness yet alertness. Your take a walk at lunch or engage in some light reading and enjoy a healthy lunch. You go back to work and by mid afternoon you eat another healthy snack which will help prevent energy crash. You leave work and exercise before coming home. Once home you spend time with your family and have a healthy dinner with possibly one glass of wine without the TV on. You finish the night sipping tea and reading which helps shift your gears down from alpha-theta-delta.

Not so ideal

You wake up to loud buzzer from alarm with not a lot of time to get to work. You just shifted from delta or theta right into beta and skipped alpha. You move quickly to get ready for work and drink 2-3 cups of coffee. You drive to work in a rush listening to music or something that aids in maintaining beta mind.

Get into work and start working feeling overwhelmed by the day tasks maintaining beta mind. You don’t drink any water pushing you into a dehydrated state. Due to the feeling of being overwhelmed you never get up at your desk till lunch. You have spent a large majority of your morning in beta mind. For lunch you eat something not so healthy loaded in high glycemic carbs and saturated fats. Your blood sugars drop an hour or so after lunch and you are tired and bouncing from alpha to theta with brief periods of beta.

To stay awake you go for more coffee or a candy bar. This helps you make it through the day yet your ability to focus is poor due to the brain waves. There is no exercise after work and instead grab a few beers. You get home and have the munchies so you eat something unhealthy. You eat too much because your blood sugars are off from too much alcohol and dehydration because you drank no water throughout the day. This puts you into a food coma on the couch where you pass out. You wake up around midnight and make your way up to bed where falling back to sleep can be difficult due to the fact that your brain waves are confused as to what part of the day it is. You eventually fall asleep yet you wake up periodically throughout the night depriving yourself from ever really spending time healing in theta and delta.

How Yoga Works (part one)

I was teaching in Charlotte this weekend at the Laughing Buddha and during one of the sessions, a student asked “How does yoga work?” I recently read a book entitled “How Yoga Works” and I cannot recommend it enough to anyone that has a yoga practice or is looking for a reason to take up the practice. I will take the next several blogs to explore this question from a different perspective than what the book focuses on.

Before we dive in, it is important to understand the etymology of the word yoga. The word means union. It is a study of polarities and it indicates two forces becoming one. It denotes the idea of finding balance between these two forces so that they can become one action. First let’s look at the mind with regards to the study of yoga.

Your body is made of trillions of cells. These cells are called neurons and they communicate with each other through electrochemical processes. The human brain has approximately 100 billion neurons. A frequency is the speed at which they are traveling. Brain waves are characterized in four different frequencies:

Beta- Fastest impulses at 13-40 cycles per second. This is associated with our normal waking state. Beta helps in logical thinking, analysis and active attention function. Stress and neurotic behaviors could throw the frequency to continuos elevated beta levels. The busier your mind the more beta waves are omitted.

Alpha- 7-13 cycles per second. This occurs during daydreaming, fantasizing and creative visualization. This is often associated with a deeply relaxed state and meditation. This is the state of mind where the mind can be calmly attentive. This is where the mind is less neurotic and more open.

Theta 4-8 cycles per second. Theta is associated with intuition, otherwise known as 'sixth sense' and allows us to access our subconscious. It is activated during deep states of meditation and dream sleep. Theta is also associated with creative thinking, and allows us to tap into our inner genius.

Delta- .5-4 cycles per second produced in deep sleep

At any given time throughout your day your brain is omitting one of these signals. We can look at these mind sets like the gears of a car. First gear is Delta, second is Theta, Alpha is Third and Beta is Fourth. Our bodies have evolved and developed so that they can shift gears throughout the appropriate states and times of the day. When we are healthy we use all of the gears for appropriate situations. If we are going to talk about how yoga works understanding brain waves is critical. In the next blog we will look at two different situations.

Yoga in a Bottle

Until the onset of electricity 100 years ago, human beings went to bed after sun down and arose at sunrise. We slept 10-12 hours a day, ate foods from the earth, walked everywhere or rode a horse. There were no tv's, ipods or emails. Life was more organic and slower, allowing us to spend more time being and inhabiting the fullness of our name as human beings. It is important to realize this is our evolutionary genetics and the way we have been living for thousands upon thousands of years. Fast forward to the 21st century, our worlds have become lightening fast. Both parents work to maintain the American lifestyle. Processed food and caffeinated beverages have become a staple in the American diet. The normal chores that are required in order to operate a household, and a family, become something that happens at night, shortening our sleep and increasing our overall workload. Things move at lightening speed with cell phones, emails and modern day efficiencies of travel. All of this can leave us under slept, over processed and in many ways out of touch. We take on the name "Human Doing" and throw our evolutionary clocks out of whack!

These are facts in the 21st century. American life is not going to slow down. If we allow ourselves to speed up with it we will find ourselves in the middle of a speeding tornado, missing our life and potentially falling prey to the three D's: dissatisfaction, depression and disease. The famous Tibetan Lama Chogyam Trungpa would often say, "where there is speed many times you find struggle". In my own life I now notice when I am moving too fast, I have developed the practice of pausing. Many times I discover a feeling of unease and struggle when I pause. A decade ago, I began the practice of Hatha Yoga to help me deal with the speed of life. Hatha Yoga is the exercise system that involves movement and breathing exercises that help bring the nervous system into a greater state of balance. Eventually, I created a style and approach to Hatha Yoga, Empowered Yoga. Our methodology is a three step process that begins with stabilizing your attention on your body and breathing. From the process of stabilizing yourself, you can't help but notice the second step which is resting in a feeling of calmness and clarity. As your practice becomes more consistent, the third step happens which is the arising of wisdom. You begin making better choices that help you become more skillful in working with the speed of the 21st century. Empowered Yoga has made a big difference in my life!

Recently, I was turned onto a product called Suntheanine. Within Suntheanine is a natural occurring amino acid called L-theanine, found mostly in teas. Clinical research suggests that 50mg - 200 mg Suntheanine naturally stimulates activity in the brain known as alpha waves, which are associated with a relaxed but alert mental state. Within 15 minutes of ingesting Suntheanine my wife and I noticed that we both felt calmer. We were doing chores around the house and we both felt more focused. Since then, we have been incorporating Suntheanine into our nutritional habits and have noticed less feelings of speediness and a greater sense of clarity. This product is like yoga in a bottle! The world needs yoga and if someone can get that yoga attitude in a bottle then maybe they will find their way into Empowered Yoga.