+++A letter from Jason at Portland Ashtanga Yoga+++

Friends!

It looks to be a busy spring — there is quite a bit of Ashtanga happening in Portland, in Oregon, and in the Pacific Northwest in general, as you'll no doubt discover as you scroll down the page.

Are you feeling a little sluggish of late? Do you find yourself favoring warm soups and thick blankets? Is it a tad more difficult to wake up in the morning? Perhaps you find winter epitomizes a physically tamasic experience?

One of Patanjali's (many) strategies for mapping our experience involves the gunas. He (enfolding the Samhkya school of thinking) suggests our experience is of three "qualities," which is the common translation of the word.These qualities are:

Sattva: illumination, harmony, or clearing
Rajas: activity, energy, movement, or changing
Tamas: stability, stasis, obstructing, and veiling.

The gunas operate on all levels, so consider that, during winter, we (or at least I) really tend toward hibernation and stasis. 

In general, the body is considered tamasic — our nervous systems, for example, are incredibly efficient with energy expenditure. If you don't use it, you lose it, because it is too costly to maintain infrequently used myelin nerve sheathes.

Contrast this with our attention spans, which tends toward rajas, or energy and movement.

Damn that Ashtanga practice! It asks us to move our bodies and steady our minds — it asks us to make our minds more tamasic and our bodies more rajasic. This produces resistance, and this resistance produces heat, or tapas ... and perhaps not a little sweat.

Sometimes we need a little extra something to produce that external heat — when in Tokyo during winter, for example, I used to practice pretty early in the morning, and usually alone. I would surround my mat with three robot space heaters.
In Encinitas, during Tim's studio transition period, we also spent time practicing in the old unheated Red Sand warehouse. It was freezing. Wool socks and beanies were the order of the day.

External heat or no heat, tapas and sweat are not the same thing. A yoga practice includes tapas. It can and should be a strain — our minds and bodies are very uncomfortable when learning the skill of deep concentration, because deep concentration can be antithetical to our evolutionary background and cultural conditioning.

On a positive note, tamas also contains within it the seeds of latent promise, waiting to be activated — we just gotta show up and do it! Thank god we get to do it together.

Does this aspect of philosophy interest you? If so, we're able to explore the gunas, more Patanjali, and other texts, in the new Sunday Conversations class, beginning Sunday, February 7, at 9:30 a.m., immediately following Mysore. Bring any question! 

Otherwise I hope to see you on your mat, or elsewhere. Thank you for your attention, and protect ya neck--
jason

+++Led class next Friday!+++
I am trying two of them — 6–7:30 and 7:30–9 a.m. Please enroll online in the class of your choice. I can't stress enough how phenomenal intermittent led classes are. A disruption in regularity attenuates the pattern and rhythms of larger practice. You can sign up for class here.