Week 4 ~ Rhythm

Get a nice cup of tea, bunny, because this week I’ve got a little reading for you before we dive into practice.

But first! Download the reflections worksheet below for week 3 to check in with how your practice is going!

Dharma

There are universal rules. The laws of physics. The speed of sound. Newton’s law: an object in motion will remain in motion (until an outside force interrupts it).

My role in this course is as the guide to expound on these “rules” of yoga as “the expert.”

Ahem, let me polish my apple and adjust my glasses. Ok, I feel like an expert:

~ ~ ~

There is a term in yoga philosophy called “Dharma.” It has been interpreted as “the work,” which is a verb - a great interpretation for when you are ready to get to work.

But as we talked about in the intro week, the term yoga itself can be used as:

a verb -to yoke- meaning to take the time to harness something… your body, your breath, your mind. Yoga can also be
a noun: the union. The union of what? Your body, your mind, your breath…

…and I would take that many steps further to the external factors (your relationships, your sense of purpose, your diet, levels of stress and amount of sleep) that affect your internal blueprint (your body, your mind, your breath):

What is your body going through? At work? At home? In love? With food? With friends? With family?… etc. etc. etc. These factors are a part of your whole - your union. The noun that is your life. You must understand these individual pieces that make up your life - your union, your noun - before you can start to productively harness them… yoke them, and be the ones holding the reigns.

Dharma is also said to be “the path to yoga.”

So if “yoga,” or the endpoint goal is a fully yolked mind body and spirit, “doing the work” is the path to get there.

No biggie, right? Easy peasy. It’s only everything that makes up who you are. (We’re breathing, we’re breathing…)

...(breathing, breathing, breathing)…

So let’s back up, and take this one step at a time:

In much the same way, Dharma must be understood before we can just jump “to work.” The other definition of Dharma - that I prefer to think of and use much more often than it’s verb counterpart - is “the higher order of things.”

Um. What?

In plain English, this implies - just like Newton and Darwin, and Einstein have helped us understand rules - that there is a map which explains a process to this “path to yoga.”

We could spend a year on this concept alone, but let’s keep it simple for now with an example:

You’re trying to get to your new job, from home. You know where home is. You know where the job is. You need to figure out the best way to get there that works in your life. Your options are:

Take the bus (slower, but gives you time to read, catch up on news, meditate…)
Take the freeway (stop-and-go, but you love that morning radio show.)
Take surface streets (keeps you moving and is scenic, though may be slower than the freeway.)
Rideshare (you give up some control, but you might make new friends)
Take a cab / Lyft (it’ll cost you, but you have a whole silent, speedy ride just to yourself.)

You can’t avoid this process of transit to get from home to work, A to B. But you do have some choices about what that process looks like.

In the same way, the path to “yoga” (a fully-yolked body, mind, & breath, AKA “self”) must be participated in certain ways: conditioning the breath, exercising the body, and training the mind are the verbs we must do. But intricately understanding our breath, our body, our minds… this is the practice.

Thanks to the autonomic nervous system, whether or not we are paying attention to the patterns of our breath, the patterns of our body, the patterns of our minds… they will continue to behave with or without our attention. Your heart will beat, your lungs will breathe, your brain will fire, your body will move, you’ll speak without thinking, you’ll react without effort, etc. This is what in classical yoga is called “conditioned existence.” Your knee-jerk reactions to things based on what you’ve always done because you’ve learned these responses through your experiences.

Up above I talked about my role as the “guide.” This means presenting this information in bite-sized pieces with examples to make it relatable.

In order to find the way you can behave within “your highest order” or Dharma, your role as the student / participant is to be observant… discerning… honest… humble… about where you are in your own practice. It is also your role to be confident, self-aware, and decisive about how to adjust the parameters of this course to suit you, your life, and your practice. In theory, when we’ve discovered our own Dharma (also sometimes interpreted as your heart’s true desire), we can live in ease, harmony, and greater resolve and sense of self, without being “thrown” by the outside world.

So, this week we’re going to bring in a friend to help us observe and break down what your individual patterns are. A friend called, RHYTHM.

Cadence

Rhythm is at our very foundation of existence. It is the beating of your heart, the cycle of your breath, the firing of your neurons. These are the life rhythms that are so essential that if any one of them stopped, very quickly we’d be dead.

Bringing this concept onto our yoga mat, we start to understand the importance of repetition in order to find cadence and rhythm.

You know the saying, “you don’t know until you go?” You must take the time to learn the basic poses, practice the sequence so you’re familiar with it, and do it over and over and over again, trying it faster or slower so that you can find what cadence - or pace - works for you and your body, mind, and breath.

If you’ve been using the recordings in this course to practice at home, bravo.

If you’ve memorized even a few of the poses in the sequence bravavissimo. (Ok, I don’t think that’s a word, but it follows the rules of rhythmic & musical language, so I’m owning it!)

Finding your own cadence is about speed. Finding the speed that works for your body, on that given day.

Finding the feeling of flow within the cadence is rhythm: when everything feels synced up, and you no longer have to think about what you’re doing, you just do it and enjoy how it feels.

And if you get lost or are struggling to find a rhythm that feels free and aligned - come back to your breath!

Practice with Cadence to find your rhythm

As such, if you have not taken the time to practice the sequence thus far to the point of memorization, I encourage you to do so. Here are some other ways to find your rhythm:

Try practicing without my voice on the recording.
Use Apple music playlist! It was built specifically to mirror the energy of this sequence.
Try practicing in complete silence. No distractions from whatever pace your breath wants and needs.
Practice with a metronome. There is a concept called “entrainment,” where our bodies will try to line up with the rhythms that surround us. Adjust the bpm (beats per minute) to see what feels like the right cadence (pace) for you. There are lots of free metronome apps out there. I personally use one called “Tempo.”