Beryl Bender Birch - Beyond Power Yoga 8 Levels of Practice for Body and Soul

A LSO BY B ERYL B ENDER B IRCH
Power Yoga

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Whew! Life is complex. I am so grateful for the time to have actually been able to write, focus on, and complete this book. Id still be on if it werent for help from my husband, life partner, business partner, and best teacher, Thom.

So my very heartfelt thanks to Thom for the precious gift of his time. Not only did he listen patiently to ideas, offer encouragement, and, as a former world-class athlete, help me to focus on the work, but he also covered months and months of my yoga classes (as well as his own) in New York City, so I could stay home in East Hampton and write. In that respect, this is his book, too. And thanks to the many loyal folks in New York City, who so generously supported our classes while I was away writing, and offered their encouragement to their classmates, longtime students, who also frequently taught for me.

Again and always, thank you to my teacher, Norman Allen, who turned me on to the methodology for beginning the practice of classical astanga. Thank you, thank you to Dusty and Sam Boynton, for the gift of time in Vermont, at the Vermont Studio Center, a retreat for artists and writers. And thanks to the Vermont Studio Center, for the incredibly creative environment they provided me. Without the month I spent at their peaceful center (no phones, TV, faxes, E-mails, etc.), where I actually wrote four chapters of this book, I never would have met my deadline with Simon & Schuster.

The title for my first book came in a vision, so I always figured the title for this one would come the same way. Well, it didnt, exactly. It came through a couple of local angels selected by God to deliver the message! Deadlines were coming and going and my left brain was working overtime. I came up with dozens of combinations of words that I liked, but nothing just came to me during a meditation, as it had in the past. I was getting mad at God for abandoning me, when lo and behold this angel walked up to me in my kitchen and out of the blue said, What about Beyond Power Yoga ? It didnt really hit me right away. It kinda half sunk in. I guess God figured that I didnt get it, so about thirty minutes later, She had another angel call from his cell phone somewhere in Lenox, Massachusetts, and say exactly the same thing. Hey, I was just driving along and this great idea just came to me. What about Beyond Power Yoga as a title for your book? Well, at that point I got it. So thanks to Pam Schulte and to Colby Lewis, for awesome help at a critical moment!

Thanks to my yogini sisters, Kathy McNames, Martha Poli, and again, Pam Schulte, for all our practice sessions the first half of 1999, going into the photo shoot for the book. And many thanks to my photographer, Nicholas DeSciose, in Denver, for his wit, skill, and patience with a camera, and his creative gift in making pictures.

Thank you to my many, many teachers who happen to be writers. They contributed invaluably to the research for Beyond Power Yoga. They are all listed in the back of the book with my comments, in the section called Additional Recommended Reading, and then, further, in the bibliography.

I am basically grateful to everyone along the way of my journey who helped bring me to this moment here and now. I like this moment. So I am grateful to everyone and everything that helped get me here. Its important to be grateful. I try to start every day with feelings of gratitude for the Divine at work in my life.

And thank you also to the many people who support my work by attending my classes, workshops, and lectures. I first tried out many of the ideas and told many of the stories in this book in workshops and classes with all of you. Without your feedback and enthusiasm I would not be in the position to continue to practice, develop, write about, and teach the material presented here.

I am enormously honored to be an author with Simon & Schuster and to have the opportunity to work with scholarly minds, like that of my editor, Roslyn Siegel. I am especially grateful to Roz for her relaxed enthusiasm, her adept skill as an editor, and her endless patience. I am also grateful to Rozs assistant, Andrea Au, who had the thankless job of taking everything I sent ina pile of photographs, a stack of paper, and little plastic disksand turning it over, in some semblance of an orderly fashion, to production. And thank you finally to the many people I do not know at Simon & Schuster, who actually transformed my vision into this beautiful book!

I probably feel the greatest sense of gratitude for all of you who bought my first book, Power Yoga. Thanks to you, Simon & Schuster was enthusiastic about publishing this book.

Finally, thank you to my blessed gurus from the animal kingdom, of which there are many. I thank the three who happen to live with me, the current family of white wolvesAnna, Snowflake, and Hopifor their unbounded enthusiasm, love of running, endless patience, and cosmic wisdom. I aspire to be more like them in this regard.

I NTRODUCTION , P ART I
The Journey to India

I NTRODUCTION , P ART II
The Awakening

Chapter 1 :
T HE S OURCE OF O UR S UPPORT : D ISCOVERING THE F UNDAMENTALS

Chapter 2 :
T HE W ORK : Y OGA IN A CTION

Chapter 3 :
T HE W ORKOUT : T HE B URNING P OWER OF A SANA P RACTICE

Chapter 4 :
M INDFUL B REATHING : C ONNECTING B ODY AND M IND

Chapter 5 :
B EYOND THE S ENSES : T URNING I NWARD

Chapter 6 :
T RAINING THE M IND : L EARNING C ONCENTRATION

Chapter 7 :
T HE P ATH TO S ELF : E XPERIENCING M EDITATION

Chapter 8 :
T HE L EAP INTO L IBERATION : K NOWING B LISS

My first book, Power Yoga, was published in January 1995. Many of the people that I hoped would buy the book had just spent a frenzied decade chasing fitness and spiraling materialism. They were getting older, stiffer, and tighter and were somewhat weary of collecting more and more stuff. Many had been injured lifting weights, running 10Ks, riding bikes, climbing mountains, hiking back-country, or doing aerobic dancing! Many of these folks were sniffing the air for signs of change. They werent quite sure what they were sniffing around for, but they were ready for the next step, whatever that might be. They had pushed their limits physically, and they were beginning to realize that there was more to life than physical fitness and a truckload of toys. They had tried everything in the medical world to rejuvenate and rehabilitate themselves, but still they were tired and tight, physically and mentally. Their doctors told them they needed to relax. They knew they needed to relax, but they didnt quite know how. They had begun to downsize and simplify their lives, but still they were overloaded.

I began the study of yoga in 1971. In 1981, after ten years of shopping around in many different yoga schools, and a major trip to India, I discovered a hatha yoga practice that was more intense, athletic, challenging, and rewarding than any other form of asana practice I had ever done. (The term hatha is a Sanskrit word, Sanskrit being the language of yoga, and hatha is generally used to refer to the physical practice of the yoga exercises, or asanas, as they are called.) It was called astanga yoga, so titled by its principal teacher, an Indian Brahmin by the name of Sri K. Pattabhi Jois. Sri Jois referred to this sequential series of postures that he taught as astanga, because he believed it to be an ancient, authentic practice and part of a larger classical eight-level system also called astanga, or raja (royal), yoga.