yoga with jeff
Based in household yoga practices of more than 40 years, Jeff’s yoga work will include group sessions, and additional content not focused exclusively on posture. That additional content will include 9 Minutes or LESS, and will include THE PRANA PROJECT. Jeff will share therapeutic, maintenance, and training that alternate between the Playful (Lila) and the Heroic (Vira). Look for an occasional Book Review, Interview, Creative Adventure, or Personal Note in realms practical and imaginative.
Interested? Want to learn more about the community?
Jeffry Farrell / yoga with jeff@jeffryfarrell
November 19, 2024
Note to accompany the 11/20/24 Livestream Wake Up
For me to do these morning wake up sessions without you in mind is pointless.
Although the world may prize self-reliance and individual effort, our true strength lies in our connections with other people. For any one of us to assert that we are ‘self-contained and autonomous’ is a self deception that leads to profound inner conflicts and ultimately to isolation.
In this thinking we find a simple and common struggle — individualism vs. our shared human connection.
Individualism may describe a path of liberation, but liberation divorced from others and a larger moral framework leads to an unbearable isolation and despair. Kumar and the Yoga lifted me out of that place more than 30 years ago and I have not gone back! For the past 25 years I have dived into the Householders’ life of family. When you might meet a yoga teacher who claims to be enlightened ask them about the last time they spent a week immersed in their family!
The turn to share in human connection is fraught with suffering of its own!
If by individual efforts we may succeed in terms of prosperity or worldly ambition or even in just reason, but ultimately fail in our quest for liberation, and if by the engagement of others we risk ambiguities and vulnerabilities and weakness, then what are we to do? What solution is there to this dilemma?
Surrender. By this I do not mean a passive acceptance of failure as destiny, but rather, I mean an active surrender of pride, an active embrace of humility. We are human.
The yoga awakens us to our own faults and limitations, and ultimately to a self-acceptance and fresh outlook. There arises the truth of our own dignity. And further, as we recognize the truth of ourselves good and bad, we find the truth of our own dignity. And then it is possible to see and share the dignity of others.
Wow. I must be feeling preachy tonight! It caught me off guard! My own pride?!
I blame it on my enthusiasm for the yoga and its results in me!
Being Consciousness Bliss!
The yoga awakens us to recognize every thought, choice and action
rippling outward and yoking us to the lives around us in common humanity.
Whatever time of day you may see this note, thanks for joining me in the Livestream.
Interested? Want to learn more about the community?
What else you may like…
Videos
Posts
Articles
Picking up hand balances again after years away.
What is needed for hand balances? How do they build? How do we enter and exit? Where is shtira?
Beginning again means asking familiar questions and looking for the answers in the posture, observing what doesn’t work, and what does. Learning twice, and twice again in Beginners Mind.
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Morning practice, Wake Up With Yoga
I recorded this last night because I must be on the road during our usual time. Here we observe three planes of functional spinal movement with breath. I invite you to recall warm-ups of this past week and to practice from whatever you can recall. If you cannot recall, then reboot yr favorite livestream recording and use that.
This week marks the start of a new endeavor at the SAMURAI INTI Martial Arts Studio in Frisco. I’ll be teaching i a group class there at Sendai Sebastian Mejias ‘ dojo on Monday and Wednesday mornings.
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