we will wear
new bones again.
we will leave
these rainy days,
break out through
another mouth
into sun and honey time.
worlds buzz over us like bees,
we be splendid in new bones.
other people think they know
how long life is
how strong life is.
we know.
—”new bones,” Lucille Clifton
It was still dark when we arrived in the classroom for the 6:30 am yoga session of the second 10-day module of my Ayurvedic Health Counselor training. I’d been anticipating this moment for months; since I considered myself a yogi first, I was eager to go deeper into the connections between Ayurveda and yoga and integrate this material into my practice. The so-called “balancing” classes we did for the doshas in Module 1 were fine, but I sensed there was more to it. I couldn’t quite imagine the original practitioners in ancient India planning a lunge-heavy sequence that would make a kapha sweat (but what did I know?).
So when the thoughts circulating through my head in those first 30 seconds were not “this is exactly what I imagined!” but rather, “when will this be over?” I was somewhat surprised. And disappointed. And angry. And overwhelmed. If I had been observing the class from the outside, I wouldn’t have thought much of the posture with which the teacher began the sequence: goat pose. Picture a pigeon-toed utkatasana, chair pose, with the ankles, knees, and hips all slightly flexed, but the legs internally rotated. The hands floated mysteriously above the navel, palms down. And the only cue he gave us, besides that initial bend of the lower joints, was equally mysterious: let your bones hold you.
My first reaction was a mix of panic, frustration, and failure. Just standing here was SO hard, and we were only about 30 seconds into a 90 minute class. It seemed like a clear harbinger that the rest of my Ayurveda training would NOT go well; how could I expect to comprehend the rest of the curriculum if I couldn’t hold a simple squat? None of the skills I thought I’d acquired from 10-plus years of yoga practice applied here, especially not the cue that had become practically reflexive when it came to standing poses: hug the muscles to the bones. I’d been taught to engage the thighs, not release them, for stability and power and endurance while doing standing asanas. I’d been taught that, because of my hypermobile joints, I needed to engage those muscles even more so my skeleton wouldn’t fall apart—and by extension, so I wouldn’t fall apart in all the ways that my mind was so good at imagining. I still had to remind my muscles, especially my thighs, to engage in poses like trikonasana (triangle) and virabhadrasana I (warrior I); now, I was being told to do the opposite—and I was failing at that, too. Even when I tried to un-hear all of my other teachers’ voices, this new cue felt literally impossible. My quads clenched their bones for dear life, trembling with effort that only increased with each cruel invitation to relax and breathe slowly. When it was finally done—probably no more than 2 minutes later, but it seemed like at least 20—I couldn’t imagine what would happen next. My legs were already so tired; how could I do any of the yoga poses I knew? Then again, after this intro, maybe none of what followed would be familiar. Deep down, I trusted there was some lesson baked into this physical and mental torture. This teacher seemed so nice, so gentle—and everyone loved him, despite him teaching this pose. But in the same way I couldn’t access my bones that morning, it was hard to believe that that deeper truth would be excavated even after 10 full days of practice—maybe not ever.
This morning, six years later, when I taught goat pose as part of the opening sequence in my yoga class, I recognized the expression of disbelief and discomfort on their faces, bodies, and breaths. Even though my thighs have since learned to relax in the pose—after several years of diligent practice—the muscles hold the memory of wanting to clench, to tremble, to help. After all, that’s what muscles do: they work. And in our culture—the movement world and society at large—muscles, and work, are usually front of mind. We want to be strong because it’s good for our minds, our longevity, even our bones (especially if we’re women). Strengthening is the new stretching is the new skinny. As I alluded to earlier, strengthening has been an integral part of my movement practice as well, supporting my hypermobile joints in a way that makes me feel literally more held together; it’s also helped release some of the unnecessary tension my nervous system produces when it senses my joints’ laxity. Strength gives me boundaries in my body and mind, and the confidence to reinforce them. Thanks to strength, I can look forward to a long-term movement practice, including yoga, without fear of wearing myself out.
Strength is only one type of energy that our bodies are capable of, however, and it’s largely an external one. Everything I just described is a way that strength has supported my ability to engage with the outer world—kinetically and relationally. Muscles give our otherwise inert skeleton the possibility of movement; the literally “articulate” the bones at the joints so you can flex at your knee and hip to lift your leg and take a step, then at your ankle and toes to connect with the floor and propel forward with that step, and all the infinite number of coordinations between muscle and bone that create locomotion. But movement itself isn’t the whole story. We always move for a reason—whether for exercise or for function, for pleasure or for survival. The purpose of movement, and the muscles that enable it, is to support the conditions for stability and growth. Case in point: whenever I focused on hugging my muscles to the bone in yoga postures, I couldn’t help but hold my breath. Sure, I was strong on the outside—but inside I was dead. Which means that in order for any movement to be meaningful, we have to have a connection to the why behind it. To use the strength (or speed, or flexibility) that movement imparts to enforce boundaries on itself. To know when we need to exert power and effort, to grow and build externally; and when to rest and integrate and grow our awareness internally. Strength is not about moving; it’s about coordinating, dosing, and pacing movement so that it is nourishing, rather than depleting.
***
Although it was elusive (and frustrating) at first, my teacher’s simple cue to “let your bones hold you” was indeed the lesson I was hoping to receive during my training. Not surprisingly, it was the perfect introduction to a profound discussion about the relationship between the body and mind, and sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, that would run through the rest of our training—and change the course of my yoga practice. You see, that muscle engagement we’re all told to prioritize for our health is inextricable from our culture’s obsession with growth, productivity, and doing. Muscles engage as part of the stress response. Period, end of sentence. Sometimes that stress is intentional and healthful (“eustress”), and sometimes it’s a reaction to a perceived threat to one’s existence. The body doesn’t know the difference between lifting up a heavy chunk of iron at the gym versus lifting a car because your child is trapped underneath; the same physiological response happens either way, including a surge of stress hormones, blood thickening, surges of blood glucose, and—you guessed it—engorging of the muscles.
A truly healthy system can turn that muscular effort on and off when it’s appropriate, and recover fairly quickly even if our child is in danger and we’re trying to save them. But our lifestyles don’t encourage that periodicity, where we’re in recovery mode more often than not. We spend a lot of time sitting, which seems like “recovery” and a reason to do more movement. A sedentary body, however, can experience higher stress when asked to move, since the muscles get sleepy and weak and are less functional when they’re needed. Meanwhile, mental stress is telling muscles in your neck, shoulders, psoas, and belly to tighten all the time. If we add deliberate movement, especially movement with load, to the equation, we’re asking those tired muscles to do a lot of effort on a nearly empty tank—and reinforcing a narrative that the feeling of soreness, tightness, and discomfort that this produces is “good” and “healthy.” Confusion ensues, as well as pain and injury. The muscles are stuck in a three-bears conundrum—too much or not enough engagement, and rarely just right.
When we look at the muscles from an Ayurvedic lens, we see how this problem can arise. Muscle (mamsa) is the third of seven dhatus, or tissue layers, which are fed both sequentially and in order of need as our food is digested and assimilated throughout the body. Preceding mamsa is lymph (rasa) and blood (rakta), which are the only two dhatus that circulate throughout the whole body—so they’re almost always being replenished and refreshed, and prioritized in the digestive process. If the system is stressed—like in the scenarios above—it might not be digesting very well, and rasa and rakta might be lackluster in terms of quality and/or quantity, leaving crumbs for poor mamsa (and everything that follows). Still, the body and all of its wisdom knows that muscle needs the most fuel if we’re in a stress response, so it might shunt more nutrition right to mamsa. The tissues before and after—including fat (medas), bones (asthi), marrow (majja), and reproduction (shukra/artava)—starve. (In modern science, this is explained through chemistry: stress acidifies the blood, which prevents calcium absorption by bones; stress will also disrupt hormone regulation, where high/excess stress hormones will steal from reproductive hormones and reduce bone density as well as alter mood, energy, concentration [majja] and normal reproductive function [shukra/artava]; all this is furthermore exactly what happens when a woman enters menopause and the balance of stress/reproductive hormones shifts toward the former.) In other words, the dhatus that impart long-term stability and homeostasis of the system, that provide fuel and structure, are sacrificed for survival. The past, and future, mean nothing without the now.
Before we start to hate on mamsa, let’s peel back another layer of Ayurvedic anatomy. Each of the dhatus has a specific job, and muscle’s job is lepana, or covering. Muscle literally covers the bones and other delicate parts of our being—the organs and channels nestled into the dark, moist depth of our bodies. It takes the first hit in the face of danger, so it needs to be as tough as possible. This even makes sense when we consider the effect of the sympathetic nervous system on the muscles. In the face of stress, the muscles tighten to fight, flee, or freeze—all different strategies of protection, sometimes literal covering. This complex dance of biochemistry has been animated in the recent Disney film, Inside Out 2. The film(s) follow the plights of a young girl’s emotions—represented as different characters that run a control center inside her brain, determining her behaviors, thoughts, and speech. As she enters adolescence in the second film, the character of Anxiety takes over the circuit board and, when unchecked by the other emotions, goes into a literal tailspin of movement that threatens to set the whole thing on fire. After the lead emotion, Joy, manages to excise Anxiety from the control center and stop the girl’s panic attack, Anxiety makes a heartfelt confession: “I was only trying to protect her.” Indeed, that’s what anxiety is—protection, albeit often misunderstood, sometimes to the point of self-destruction.
***
So far, I’ve painted a picture of a common situation for today’s human body: high stress, high muscle tension, a false and/or desperate sense of stability. But let’s dig deeper and excavate what a healthy, functional mamsa dhatu would engender. In service of true stability, mamsa will feed medas, asthi, and majja, interconnected dhatus that form the literal core of our being. Together, these dhatus might represent the opposite of muscle—the parasympathetic nervous system, or rest and digest. On the surface, this makes sense; these dhatus are much more inert, heavy, and dense . . . except for bone. Indeed, bone presents a bit of a conundrum, since it’s notoriously porous and fragile (we’re taught to eat and supplement and move in ways to “protect our bones” from childhood; I have binders full of “Got Milk?” ads to prove it!). It’s also the only dhatu governed by vata dosha, which is intangible and invisible. And yet, the role of asthi dhatu is dharana, or holding . . . why would our “intelligent” system give such a big job to something so frail?
The answer to this riddle—and the secret behind the cooperation of mamsa and asthi—lies in the infinitely mysterious, powerful, and beautiful essence that is vata. You see, whereas pitta and kapha govern the other six dhatus in a direct relationship, vata—in its typical idiosyncratic way—governs asthi inversely. That is, when vata decreases, bone increases. This makes sense: less stress/movement would create more stability, density, holding power. By extension, we might think to apply the old Ayurvedic adage, “like increases like, and opposites balance,” to argue that increasing pitta and kapha in the system might support the bone layer by decreasing, or “balancing,” vata. And yet, again, the inverse is true. As we’ve seen, increased muscle engagement might be the result of increased vata, and wind up choking and starving asthi dhatu. Stilling bones—aka limiting movement—is indeed the protocol for conditions like osteoporosis or osteoarthritis. But in doing so, we risk starving the bones of their true purpose, which is movement. The engagement of a muscle is utterly meaningless without an object to act upon; all of that strength is fulfilling the desire of the bones to be moved. When vata is in charge, the muscle’s protective instinct might trick us into thinking that survival is the ultimate goal. But when the true opposite of vata is in charge, that desire looks like maintenance. The kind of movement that is so smooth and controlled and efficient it looks like stillness, but is anything but.
That life-affirming movement is prana. Prana is technically the refined form of vata, so I’m taking liberties with the “opposite” definition—it’s more like how when one quality becomes so extreme it turns into the opposite, like a cold so cold it burns, or a heat so hot it’s numb. (In TCM, you can see this visually in the classic yin yang icon; start anywhere on the outside of the circle, and if you draw a line straight across through the center you’ll wind up in the opposite quality.) But they do have several opposite effects in the body. Whereas vata—including vata season, and vata stage of life—are considered the “ends,” full of death and destruction of life, prana is the origin, the sustainer of life, the force of life itself that moves between bodies and beings and souls as the mortal bits of us decay. Vata destabilizes—the big, sudden wind that knocks you down—whereas prana stabilizes—which is why it’s often associated with water as much as it is wind/air.
When we focus on prana, we see the inwardly-focused why behind the outward, stimulating movement of the muscles. We might think that the energy we get from a run comes from the muscles, the heart and lungs pumping, the thrill of crossing the finish line, but it all starts when the body hears that teasing whisper: “come get me.” We might think that the passion and intensity of new love is a spark, but it all starts with that whisper of longing saying, “look over here,” that turns heads and eyes and attentions toward each other. We think that the fire of digestion transforms our food and absorbs nutrients, but it all starts with the whisper of appetite stoking that fire and begging the body: “feed me.” We might think we are okay, heck, better than okay!!!, when we grip and clench to stay on top of things; we know we are okay when we can hear the whisper from our bones reassuring us: “let go, we’ll hold you.”
Prana is all of those whispers. If vata is the dosha—the mistake—that ends, then prana is its opposite: a steadiness of existence that neither ends nor begins. A holding of life in place as it cycles through birth and death.
Recall the lesson from Disney: the breakdown of the emotional control center due to emotions happened in the mind. Indeed, there is a high correlation between the mind and the subtle energies of prana and vata—all three move and change quickly, are largely intangible, and yet have the power to radically shift the material reality. One quality of the mind in particular demonstrates the way prana balances vata in an oppositional way, despite their fundamental sameness. Svasya nigraha (self-restraint) explains how the inherent steadiness of the mind (prana, or in this case more like sattva) makes it the only thing capable of bringing an unsteady mind (vata, or rajas/tamas) back into balance. By exercising patience, according to the Caraka Samhita, the mind can disentangle itself from distracting external objects of attention that cause it to enter into a stress response. Patience requires a faith in the unknown, the direct opposite of what the mind is programmed to prioritize: fear. It is the force that moves us through the paralyzing fear of the dark because it knows there will be light on the other side. Likewise, when more abstract aspects of the mind like belief systems are the root of a vata imbalance/stress response, no amount of purely external steadying can make a significant difference (e.g., try telling someone who’s having a panic attack—or encountering a difficult yoga pose—to “just relax and breathe”). Practices like meditation, restorative yoga, or other forms of relaxation might chip away at the mind’s natural, self-protective reaction, but only once the whole system believes it is truly safe will the state of the dhatus and doshas change. The mind’s self-contained power allows it to traverse between gross and subtle realities in an inherently balancing way.
So the last shall be first, and such is the case in this final layer of bone-digging: the spirit. With the increase of vata in our environment during the autumn season, we have an opportunity to hear the whispers of a more collective, interconnected prana with more clarity and satisfaction. Namely, with a greater access to spirit, we can commune more directly with those who have passed on—whose bodies have decayed to due vata but whose spirits still reside in prana-land. This is why so many cultures celebrate and honor the deceased in the fall. From the Ancestor Fortnight of the Vedic tradition, which just ended with the last new moon, to the Day of the Dead, Halloween, and All Souls and All Saints Days, there are abundant opportunities to support the prana of those we love and miss by directing our own attention toward them. Prana follows attention, and so the life force we share with them (and can replenish through our food, breath, and sleep as living bodies) only supports their ability to hold onto life in another plane. The thinness of the veil of reality enables this powerful energetic transfer, which at other times of the year is harder since more of our attention (and prana) is needed in our periphery. We might take this time to literally honor and venerate our bones—the parts of us that are the last to decay when we die, that symbolize how strongly our systems can hold onto life even after it has ended. What have our bones been carrying from other lives that we are working to sustain—or that we are ready to put down and lay to rest? What qualities do we want our bones to possess as they carry us through the past and future?
Note that if our systems are dominated by vata—erratic movement—due to anxiety, poor sleep or nutrition, or recent or unprocessed grief, then this time of year will feel dysregulating, even debilitating. But if vata is in its more refined state of prana, then it can see itself in the spirits around us and be at ease. It recognizes itself in life and death. This is inherently calming and grounding. The threats that normally cause our muscles to seize up and protect us from—the threat of dying—fades away, and we can lean into our bones. The bones in our own bodies, and the bones that made the marrow and dna that formed our bodies, and the bones that formed those bones…the bones carry us, even when they’re dust.
***
This month in my classes, we’re digging up the bones from underneath the effort of muscle with a slow flow practice. To be perfectly honest, I’m a little nervous about how it’s going to go given my own vata tendencies, so I’m really practicing with you all with the intention of refining that vata into prana and applying my mind’s capacity for patience. I’m teaching a sequence I’m calling the Sukha Sadhana—the practice of “good space”—comprising a series of mini-vinyasas united by a steady, rhythmic attention to breath, repetition, and the prana and apana vayus (in in-and-down and down-and-out directions of vata). I do this sequence when I practice at home on my own, so I’ve smoothed out all the kinks and have it imprinted in my body. Not in muscle memory; bone memory.
The challenge of this practice is the consistency. As a student and a teacher, I thrive in a space of novelty; in my experience, new sequences and movements keep the mind sharp and awake and prevent the body from getting too comfortable with habits. Coming up with new classes several times a week is a creative exercise for me, and helps me get to know the practice from many angles. But at this moment in time, I’m craving comfort. Prana isn’t just whispering, it’s using its full head voice to let me know that sharing movement that’s predictable, simple, and well-rounded is the direction to follow. The desired goal is to have the practice become familiar enough that you don’t need to think about it; the movements flow on their own, riding the waves of prana that our bones have been collecting and holding onto all spring and summer. The traces of vata in me worry I’ll get bored after week two, or that I’ll start feeling insecure that my students are getting bored and I’ll go back to novelty. We’ll see if my own experiment works, and if this practice proves svasya nigraha is real.
But the fact that I’ve arrived here, with three months left of my year-long exploration of embodying spirit through yoga, is more than enough proof, and gives me not just hope but excitement for what this vata season will reveal for me. I began the year with the intention of exploring the spiritual aspects and motivations behind the various categories of yoga postures—standing poses, twists, backbends, etc.—in tandem with the energetic rhythms of the seasons. The sequences I followed month to month came almost too easily—the arc of the year mapped perfectly onto the arc of a standard, well-rounded yoga class (at least, in the way I was taught); and the movements my body craved were almost always satisfied by the planned curriculum. I’ve never been bored or uninspired (knock on wood); in fact, I found myself uttering some of the most moving words I’ve ever said during these classes, and in writing about these cycles of building, flowering, and letting go. I finally feel like I’m holding myself up in this work because it’s so self-sustaining.
As a student and teacher, part of me wishes I could have fast forwarded to this moment and skipped all the stages of trying so hard—trying to memorize anatomy and physiology, to teach in a way that I thought would make me popular, to listen so closely to cues that were stifling the inner cues I needed to hear. But without meeting these external forces, I wouldn’t have found the strength I now have to stop doubting the rhythms of my life. In all this talk about strength, I’ve elided a type that isn’t connected to muscle at all, but bone itself. According to a physiology principle called Wolff’s Law, bone that is under repeated stress will lay down more of its own tissue to support that load—e.g., a bunion that forms on the big toe mound when someone walks around in high heeled shoes, due to the excess load on that joint. Bone responds to stress not by calling out for external support out of fear, but by simply creating more of itself.
This is the wisdom of the body. Knowing that when we dig deeper into our layers, we don’t find a way out of those clenching, crumpled postures of pain or discomfort or fear. We discover a path in and through those states that reflects back a more refined, more nourishes, more upright version of ourselves. The Self that is radiant with ojas, sattva, and prana, and strong enough to hold everything together because that’s its only job: to be itself.
