A Yogini’s Manifesto

Yogini: a female yogi, someone who practices yoga. While this seems simple enough, add a feminine ending to any word in English and you diminish it. This wasn’t always so. Words like tigress, poetess, and mistress originated without any derogatory intent. Today it’s implicit, if we use them at all. The Sanskrit ‘yogini’, however, stands somewhere in between its hashtag image of a nearly naked woman seducing the camera on a beach and the collective presence of mythological Indian sorceresses, real rishikas (female rishis, sages and seers), and the revered female teachers of Tantra in India, Nepal and Tibet. Why not retain the awe then, call myself a Yogi, and be done with the discomfiting feminine tail of ‘ni’?

 

Dropping the feminine in how we as women interact in the social world can feel like gaining a kind of strength, necessary in some circumstances because it gets us more respect. But the price is the loss of our integrity at its most essential. Something goes missing. More than that, something that only arises when male and female live together in us is never realized. When we grab hold of the feminine again, what’s gained is not just that. Something new is born. It’s the power— I want to say spiritual, and it is, but that’s not all of it— of our true humanity. Disintegrated spirituality causes pain. We see so much of it in the world right now in fundamentalist and nationalist religious movements and in individuals who have sacrificed what is most precious for a “spiritual” life. The power of our humanity manifests in us when we bring together the things that don’t seem to fit together: our hope and our despair; our generosity and the anguish of our lack; our idealistic drive and our impulsive reactivity; our reverence and our hate…and most importantly, our authentic sexual and spiritual expressions, for they are the ground of all else in us. When we stand on the native land of our humanity, love and its compassion is born. Not sentimental feeling and its “being nice”, but a visceral passion for ourselves and others.

 

In claiming the name of Yogini, I take ownership of the Feminine. She has presented a fractured presence in the world through thousands of years of misogyny. I am whole and it’s time I am heard. Take the Feminine away from me and you take away not only my heart, but the very heart of Yoga. She is missing in most of how yoga is being taught and practiced today. Bring the inhale and exhale together, body soft in its resilient strength, and every polarity in the universe collaborates to create the whole human being you were born to be in all the feeling of its passion. The nurturing source and force of life animates you. It is the Mother principle and potential in everyone. Without it, sex and spirit are split apart, not least in women ourselves. It is the complete collaboration of male-female, our creative and procreative power, at once sexual and spiritual. Yoga calls it Hridayashakti. ‘Hrid’ means heart, not our beating organ, but the whole of what we are.

Yogini with serpentine energy from her yoni. South India, c. 1800; wood h. 12 in. The Art of Tantra by Philip S. Rawson

 

The intersection of sex and spirituality has been the place of my work as a doula/traditional midwife and a Yoga teacher over the last 25 years now. Its relevance isn’t limited to women’s health, or feminist spirituality, but to the core of human longing. Whether expressed in ancient texts, popular culture, or political rhetoric, we want freedom and love. Confusing them with polarized ideas of God and Sex, we’ve been strategizing about how to get one or the other for literally ages.

 

In areas where the Feminine is assumed to be present and active, we manipulate it, repress it, or out rightly deny it. Hospital ‘labour and delivery’ units are one example, where depending on where you are in the world, 30% to 80% of women give birth through major abdominal surgery (the WHO says higher than 15% does more harm than good). Wombs aren’t just sliced open, but the neuro-hormonal flow of love hormones that accompanies our life force is severed in the process too. Without our bodies and our babies’ being saturated in it at the time of birth, our ability to love both self and baby/other can be compromised lifelong (see Michel Odent’s Primal Health Research Data Bank). Being sexual-spiritual, it is responsible for both the birth process and everyone’s orgasm. For this reason alone, I think it’s fair to say that many of the world’s women have become separated from our own Feminine. Research on orgasm rates supports this: in one large study 10% to 20% of women reported never having experienced an orgasm, and 30%+ of women rarely, if ever, orgasmed during sex with a partner. Not that that should be the only judgement of pleasure. A recent multinational study reported heterosexual men took 5.4 minutes on average to ejaculate after penetration, testament to a common lack of “not knowing” in both men and the women they have sex with. Less research has been done on same-sex partners, but what has, showed no significant difference for men, and a significant positive one for women, who orgasmed with each other more consistently. A test of basic knowledge of body parts in American women under the age of 25 found 50% of them couldn’t locate the vagina on a diagram and 30% didn’t know where the clitoris was. From my experience teaching couples, I would expect young men to fare even worse. Add on the physical and/or sexual violence from an intimate partner that up to 70% of women worldwide endure (UN statistic), and you might want to lie down and weep.

 

Correspondingly, when female teachers stand in the image of Yogini and use patriarchal paradigms and power mechanisms to our own advantage, we are not teaching Yoga. Having a vagina is not enough. The integrity of women and the Feminine has been broken. In its place, we perform our womanhood, and sexiness becomes a construct of self-manipulation long before it manipulates others. For some, our sex is literally dirty; blood and vaginal fluids disgust us, and our pleasure, or its lack, humiliates us. The pill can be used simply for the convenience of avoiding having periods. A friend told me seven million women use the period tracking app, Flo, which recently had an ad selling a “secret way” to delay or eliminate menstrual bleeding. The parallel is in women’s periods spontaneously stopping during fast-track yoga teacher trainings in India due to some combination of inadequate diet, weight loss, lack of sleep, dissociative and/or otherwise inappropriate yoga practices, and the stress of culture shock. Several women have told me when this happened to them, they believed the yoga was “purifying” them. I’ve seen marketing for women’s “sacred sex” trainings promote the same, saying reducing the days of bleeding, or stopping them altogether, is spiritually advantageous. The fact is: how much you bleed is determined by how much estrogen you produce. If it’s low, the lining of your uterus will be less thick, and so when it’s released, your bleeding will be lighter and shorter. Average length of bleeding is from three to five days; some women bleed for two days, some for a week, but having a significant decline from your own normal is a sign of a hormonal imbalance, not impending enlightenment. The first action of an effective Yoga practice is to promote and sustain physical health and fertility. Ayurveda, the healing paradigm that is a sister to Yoga understands and supports this.

In the Yonitantra menstruation is designated the ‘flower’—pushpa. South India, c.18th century, wood Kali the Feminine Force by Ajit Mookerjee

 

Patriarchy has put the unlimited intelligence and power of our female selves outside of ourselves in the ghostly form of the Goddess, which means we as women are outside the very thing that makes us alive. Men are too, searching for the Feminine in an “other”. Looking to transcendent spiritual practice and the men and women who teach it to get what remains at the centre of our existence is crazy. We are “beside ourselves” in this insanity.  Only by nourishing our procreative functioning in its evolving stages throughout our lives, and participating in it—Yoga practice, sex, giving birth, and being with birth are the most direct means— is its source revealed. We are it.

 

Human birth symbolizing the universal phase of creation. South India, c. 18th century; wood Kali the Feminine Force by Ajit Mookerjee

 

I love what yoga teacher, Emily Kuser, who is based in Bali, posted on Instagram (13 July 2017 @highvibeyoga) after attending a birth: I gotta say– for most of my life I didn’t understand this stuff. I was spooked by birth and death. I had to unlearn a lot and am still at it. How bizarre to recognize again and again that birthing a baby happens naturally, and dying happens naturally too– that things just happen when they’re ready to…

 

Our movement in and out of existence and our life in between cannot be manipulated, forced, or controlled. This has profound implications to what we imagine spiritual practice to be. It also explains why a society that fears life would want to control the people it most directly comes through: women. Our silence banishes us from ourselves. Our shame is our enslavement.

Yantra of the evolution & involution of the cosmos; the expanding & contracting currents of vibration from and to the One. Rajasthan, c. 19th century; gouache on paper Yantra, The Tantric Symbol of Cosmic Unity by Madhu Khanna, Foreword by Ajit Mookerjee

 

 

When I was in Fiji last summer, a grandmother shared a relevant story with me. She was an Indigenous woman and she told me in her culture it is “tamboo” (written tabu, where we get the English word ‘taboo’ from) to talk about giving birth; mothers stay silent, saying nothing, even to their own daughters, so that they themselves give birth for the first time in utter ignorance. Indigenous Fijian culture has been a rigid hierarchy with women at the bottom of it. She had taken part in a workshop I had given on the Yoga of Birth the day before, and later that night she spoke to her twenty-something year old daughter about it and what it had been like to give birth to her. Their conversation left them both in tears. She said her daughter was so grateful she had given voice to the unspoken.

 

A couple of days later, she brought this daughter, a grand-daughter accompanied by her infant son, and her own best friend, a grandmother as well, to speak on camera with us. I was touched by their trust. During the discussion, she told me she and her best friend had learned a method of fertility awareness from an expat friend decades ago. Through the course of a cycle, changes in basal body temperature, cervical mucus, and cervical position give clear signs of ovulation and its passing. They had both used the method successfully to know when there was a possibility of conceiving a child or not. I myself learned how to do this when I was in my mid-twenties, and I feel every woman should have the option of such intimate knowledge of herself. It is immense power.

Diagram showing the seed-sounds for the movement of the life force. Detail of a manuscript page from Nepal, 18th century; ink on paper 2.5 X 10 in. The Art of Tantra by Philip S. Rawson

 

 

“Relationship moves the life force, nothing else.” When I first heard Mark Whitwell say this, I immediately understood it in relationship to birth. My midwife, Mary Sharpe, had trusted me and I her. Our faith in each other had provided the conditions necessary for my relationship with my breath and body to flourish and guide me. In deep feeling, I was able to give birth to my daughter at home, despite the obstacle revealed at the end. As her head crowned, her right fist came with it, balled at her left temple. It had taken great softening and patience to allow my pelvis to open for her, and great strength to push her through it. She was a large baby, 8lbs 10oz, and her scalp had a graze on it where it had scraped past my bones. Years later, I realized the waves of energy moving through me as contractions, rising higher and higher until she was born, was the same phenomenon that happens in response to Yoga practice. God and sex are indeed one. In birth, the love hormones oxytocin and endorphins flood our babies’ systems and our own, bringing us both into what Yoga calls our Natural State, Sahaj Samadhi. We don’t need training in sexual or spiritual technique to enjoy this reality, but the strength needed to truly receive our experience. Then we are moved by love. A Yoga practice, which brings masculine and feminine principles into collaborative exchange gives us its power.

 

Sex and birth are the heart’s activity. If we separate them from feeling, they turn into something painful and crudely manipulative. Broken hearted, we disintegrate. We go numb. We fall apart. Historically, society has offered us few options to pull ourselves together again: “celibate saint”, “spiritual whore”, or “wife and mother” owning neither her sex nor her spirit. A man in search of healing his own separation from the Feminine, which patriarchy demands of him, is likely to be metaphorically fucked from the get-go, if he looks to a woman who is herself separated. Her sex won’t be love and another gash in the Mother wound will be inflicted.

Rati-asana, sexual embrace; stone; Khajuraho, Visvanatha Temple, 1059-1087 A.D. photo: Archeological Survey of India Tantric Art by Ajit Mookerjee

 

 

Giving birth isn’t necessary at the individual level, but if the source of our inherent power to do so, Hridayashakti (still present when we are infertile, which is much of the time in one ovulatory cycle, and continuous in the times before menarche and after menopause), is not something we are participating in in any way, we experience the sexual and spiritual aspects of ourselves and our relationships as distinct from one another, and creativity of any kind is compromised. Society supports this polarization and feeds it. Yoga as it’s mostly being delivered into the world does so too. Neither strength of will nor good intentions will heal it. It must be addressed at the functional energetic level from where it comes.

Sri Yantra created in an electronic vibration field, an experiment in the translation of sound into vision. Still from a film by Ronald Nameth Yantra, The Tantric Symbol of Cosmic Unity by Madhu Khanna, Foreword by Ajit Mookerjee

 

In Vagina: A New Biography (2012), Naomi Wolf addresses the correlation between sexual violence against women and the resulting suppression of our psychological well-being. The complex neurological connections between genitals and brain in females is not matched in males. Our pleasure pathways are rich. So are our pain. They are the same. Because of it, in the extreme, mass rape of a female population has the power to subjugate it. Even subtle violence can shut a woman down. Part way through the book, Wolf found herself unable to write for six months, after a demeaning sexual comment a man made to her at a dinner party.

 

The delicate link of ‘above to below’ Wolf explored is essential to the birth process; feeling at the cervix, the lower neck of the uterus, is the stimulus for the pituitary gland in the centre of the brain to release oxytocin and endorphins, the fuel of labour. Within the uterus itself, the same dynamic occurs: layers of uterine muscles simultaneously draw the cervix up into its body, as their strength presses the baby down through it. The Sri Yantra, a geometric diagram of the Goddess as Source, describes exactly this with five downward moving triangles intersecting with four upward ones. The downward flow is more often labelled female against what’s considered the upward male, although the names are sometimes reversed. What remains unchanged is the primacy of Life’s constant regenerative nature, which is in the convergence of slightly imbalanced opposite forces, not their divergence. Reality isn’t an oppositional affair, and not a static one either. The imbalance creates the directional quality of movement that is Time, ‘kala’ in Sanskrit. Kala also means ‘black’, and it is the dark expanse of space-time that makes birth and death possible; the goddess named Kali embodies this. The triangle is one of the oldest portrayals of the goddess in India: a stone triangle dated 9,000-8,000 BCE was found in the Son River Valley. The Shakti yantra is one downward pointing triangle containing a downward pointing arrow, just in case you needed the reinforcement of understanding the directional import! The Shakti yantra is the primordial triangle, the creative matrix of the cosmos, as is a woman’s yoni. The Sri Yantra, like all yantras, isn’t an aspirational tool but rather a reflection of our present living state. Its vibration is ours. When you realize this for yourself, you are meant to dissolve the yantra in the river and go on your way. Inner and outer reality are one.

Shakti Yantra, primordial triangle, yoni, creative matrix of the cosmos. Rajasthan, c.17th century; gouache on paper. Yantra, The Tantric Symbol of Cosmic Unity by Madhu Khanna, Foreword by Ajit Mookerjee

 

When I was living in Rishikesh a few years ago, images of Durga riding Her tiger were all over the place, painted on walls, the sides of trucks and the fronts of T-shirts. Offerings were made to Her and mantras chanted. At the same time, the suffering in India’s post-colonial society was blatant, and the strength needed to fully receive an inhale and merge it with an exhale, body soft in its prowess, was nowhere to be found. Instead, yoga as physical manipulation and force of breath was in every ashram and teacher training that had arisen in my neighbourhood. The quest for transcendence was everywhere.

 

This came home to me one evening at a havan/fire ceremony I attended in worship of the Goddess. A young European woman recommended that those of us who were menstruating shouldn’t throw offerings into the fire because the strong downward moving energy of our bleeding would conflict with the upward moving energy of the flames, dampening their power to reach Her. The conflict would also personally harm us, she said, something her Indian guru had taught her not in order to demean women but to protect them. I was stunned. She spoke as if we are not already spirit’s fire and holy water. Meanwhile, a few minutes’ walk away, the waters of the Ganges River flowed in the Himalayan darkness as they always had. The goddess Ganga and the river are one. She comes down from heaven through the matted locks of Shiva’s long hair. She is forever falling. He prevents her from flooding the world, while She bathes his lingam, cooling its perpetually white-hot seed. Together, Ganga and Shiva are every life, the mutual collaboration of every opposite.

Sri Yantra with mantra, bearing gurus’ thumb prints in red ink. Rajasthan, c.1800; ink and colour on paper 9 X 8 in. The Art of Tantra by Philip S. Rawson

 

If you say a yogi is a male who has the strength to receive the Feminine, the nurturing force of his own life, the same is true for a yogini. It is not reversed for her. The Masculine is the very intelligence of the Feminine, which is infinite consciousness. Therefore, the Masculine can be received amid all life. In fact, it must be, otherwise disassociation results. In receiving the nurturing force of her own life, she removes herself from the stranglehold of patriarchy. Then, if she sexually loves a man, she merges with the Feminine, which runs through his male form like the water in Shiva’s dripping wet hair. He is saturated with Her. She is at once the river and its crossing over place, Mother, Ma. Yogi and yogini come home to the heart/hridayam together.

 

Om Sri Shivayai namaha can be translated as, “Salutations to Her who is blessed Shiva!” The Goddess is consciousness and that is everyone. T. Krishnamacharya (1888-1989) had the technical knowledge relevant to this. He was the grandfather of modern Yoga, the ‘teacher of the teachers’, and he said you cannot meditate, meaning you can’t control consciousness. Meditation is simply what we are. Like Emily said, “…things just happen when they’re ready to…”

Devi, Cosmic Energy; within Her is Shiva, the foundational Consciousness. Pahari School, c.18th century; gouache on paper Kundalini, The Arousal of the Inner Energy by Ajit Mookerjee

 

This past Mother’s Day, my daughter gave me Sheila Heti’s book, Motherland (2018). Isabella knew I was mid-stream in my writing here. Heti began her book with the hope of coming to peace with her path as a writer and a lover, which she felt didn’t include bearing a child. She framed the book as a series of questions to the Universe about whether in fact it should. I think the ensuing dialogue was her way of structuring an intimate encounter with the source of her creativity. It scared her. Early in the book she compared the confrontation to Jacob’s wrestling with the angel in the Old Testament story. One night, he crossed a river carrying his two wives, eleven sons, and all their possessions to leave them on the other shore. All alone on his personal ground zero, a creature came and wrestled with him until the dawn. By that point, his terror had turned to love, and in it he saw that the creature was really an angel, and he asked it for its blessing. It gave him a new name, Israel, “one who contends with God”. It had wounded his hip and so he walked with a limp, but what he had thought would destroy him, hadn’t. The nurturing force of our life is love’s expression. Its source is the heart, the place where all polarities originate from and return. The danger we can sense, when we get very close to it, is the nearness of our own seeming annihilation, because in love we know our unity with everything.

Footprints photo Inner Beauty, Inner Light, Yoga for Pregnant Women by Frederick Leboyer

 

Heti’s mother was a doctor who admitted neglecting her children emotionally while she poured herself into her work and into trying to save her disintegrating marriage. Our patriarchal legacy is to have our work, our marriage and caring for our children all pitted against each other. We wrestle with them every day. Given the right personal and social circumstances, we could live with them in mutual collaboration instead. In the Natural State, mother, father and child are not split off from each other clawing for love. The price Heti saw in becoming a mother was the dual sacrifice of her lover and her writer’s soul, a price she wasn’t willing to pay. She spoke of a curse of pain having been put on her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, which had then fallen upon her mother and her too. In writing her book, she felt she had broken it. She became the nurturing source, physician for them all.

 

The final line of her book reworks a line of Jacob’s: Then I named this wrestling place Motherhood, for here is where I saw God face-to-face, and yet my life was spared. I know this place. I’ve seen Her face and it is mine.

 

Womb. Moon. Cycles. Rhythm. Ebb and flow. Blood. Fluids. Birth and death. The female body is the most ancient of time-keepers, its pulses fast and slow: orgasm; the ripening and destruction of an egg; the long-blossoming of pregnancy and the ever-quickening thrust and penetration of birth; the sometimes-blissful thrumming in the suckling of a child; and the refined vibration, endless, when womb and woman have moved together into the open field of wisdom. Female experience is the whole-body revelation of our interdependent and infinite beginnings and endings. We are the emptiness/sunyata of Buddhist doctrine, and the fullness/purna of Vedantic. Wholeness is our reality and she has a name.

Newborn’s face and hands photo Birth Without Violence by Frederick Leboyer

Freedom

I came home from a birth early morning yesterday.  Two hours from the first contraction to the last, its speed required me to be extraordinarily receptive to what was happening moment by moment.  Timing was everything.  The trust my client and I had in each other made it work.  I had been with her for the births of her first two children and I truly knew her.  I’ve been connected with hundreds of women in this way now.  Invisible threads link us together in a fantastic web.  Two nights ago, the thread with this client was taut and glistening; I had packed my bag, laid out clean clothes, done my yoga and gone to bed early.  I was ready for her.  Two hours later, her husband woke me.  From my place to theirs, to the hospital parking lot, triage and finally the labour room, we moved with focus and calm.  In a birth so fast, the intensity of what’s moving is immense and we had the strength to receive it.

Grace poured down.  I did very little.  My client didn’t need my touch or voice.  We barely spoke.  She already knew how to give birth.  And yet she wanted me with her.  So did her husband.  Why?  My feeling is that it was for the connection we have.  She trusted it with her life.  In the web of it, she was free.  Real intimacy is generally absent in ordinary society and yet it’s essential for birthing and dying and any other time of healing. As a culture, we don’t understand this and so we set up barriers to it with the expectation that then we can’t hurt each other.  In the “health care” system, the idea of “professional distance” only keeps us aloof from understanding and the compassion that comes from it.  A similar situation exists in the yoga world.  In flight from the authoritarian or manipulative guru, students still practice these same gurus’ techniques.  Throwing away the relationship but keeping its dysfunctional container makes no sense.  The abusive teacher is not a random accident but the product of the broken masculine paradigm s/he was created in.  The paradigm is the root of the problem.  Denial of life is in everyone’s background, so we all walk with wounds.  Whether they bring us deeper into our humanity or send us further away from it, depends on our relationship with ourselves.  When the feminine principle of receptivity is brought in, we have a complete container.  Our integrity is guaranteed because we are whole.

Autonomy is the natural response to intimacy.  At the most primal level of existence, this is true.  Only after nine months in complete union with our mother, can we penetrate the world.  Two nights ago, my client stood alone while we stood beside her.  In her solitude, she did the most intimate thing possible.

Sexless

A piece of fiction that is true.  Everything was made in shades of green and blue.  She stood and leaned against the wall or over a bed, hips circling. Hot blood dripped onto the cold floor, circles within circles.  The head pressed deep.  The nurse asked her to come onto the bed.  She said I’m coming.  Another nurse arrived and set up obstetric tools.  The resident looked like a twelve year old, the husband said after.  His wife’s lips part, wet hair revealed.  No one but mother and child are ready.  Panting mixes with primal sound.  Do you still imagine giving birth is sexless?  Smell the ocean here.  A world is breaking.  Breathe earth and iron.  Stop now.  Let yourself soften to this, wet and warm, burning open, rising up.  And she slips free, a fish swimming in air,  unaware that the elements are rearranging themselves.  Hush.  Who are you?  Silence.  Then the clang of metal on metal, breath on breath.  And she penetrates.

Meditation is Life

“You Don’t Need to Meditate” is the title of a blog post J. Brown wrote last month.  It’s a provocative premise to throw out into the yoga community and the comments on it reflected that.  J. and I both have Mark Whitwell as a teacher. That doesn’t mean we have the same experience of Yoga but it does mean we share principles of practice and trust the experience that arises from their application.  So I thought J.’s post would be a good place to jump off of to share my understanding.

Here’s what I know: meditation isn’t something that can be done; it’s something that happens when the conditions are right. Meditation is the gift/siddhi we get when we immerse our mind in the intelligence that moves our body and breath. Meditation is not to become “conscious” because consciousness is what we already are and is something that is impossible for the mind to contain.  If we try never- the- less, consciousness’ free flow becomes restricted.  This happens when we aim to witness our experience, constructing an “other” that we can then observe. However, when we move fully into our experience, the boundaries we set up between ourselves and the rest of the world become irrelevant in the face of our essential limitlessness. This unfettered energy that is our life is the creative power of the Feminine.  When I gave birth, it became clear to me that there was no difference between me and what was moving through me, utter strength realized in utter openness. I was the receiver and the giver of life, both.  All of us, male and female, woman and child, are this source and force.  Trying to separate from ourselves in order to become “aware” is a brutal act of disintegration and our integrity is lost in the violence of it.

Mark says that it is not enlightenment that any of us really want but intimacy.  Intimacy is enlightenment though, not in the heroic ideal of being outside of experience, but in the real meaning of being at one with everything, even with what is unloved, our fear and dread, our sense of unworthiness and our shame.  Intimacy honours darkness and the wisdom found when words fail and even the idea of love loses its meaning. Still, intimacy remains. It is our natural state, what Yoga calls sahaj samadhi. We give birth in it; we are born in it and we die back into it. Intimacy is love divested of the mind’s parameters. This love is what Yoga practice is meant to offer us, not unending bliss but a heart that is whole. Pain is a “given”, necessary for our security and growth. Imagining that we can live apart from pain, and not cause harm in the process, is craziness and yet this idea is at the root of all transcendent philosophy, to which conventional yoga belongs. Recognition of the sacredness of our simple existence is essential to our sanity and the preservation of our humanity. Spirit isn’t absent from blood and bone and the fire that burns in the deep of the earth.

The challenge for all spiritual traditions now, including Yoga, is to let go of the dream of enlightenment and fully embrace our lives and each other. This means embracing the Feminine. I read yesterday here that for the first time in history Tibetan Buddhist nuns are being allowed to write exams that will grant them the title of “Geshe” and give them full access to the teaching monks have always received, which includes “ethics in their entirety”. As if ethical action can exist when we stand removed from others and deny their equal worth! I didn’t realize that the nuns have continued to be so overtly oppressed. They “have to obey the monks, can’t give them advice, and even the most senior nun still has to take a lower seat than the greenest rookie monk.” This is in a tradition that has at its root the knowledge that perfection is the nature of all things and that meditation is effortlessly present when we come into Yoga. That knowledge though, has been obscured in the misogyny of Tibetan culture.

A similar obscuration of wisdom took place in India. Krishnamacharya did what he could to restore the Feminine to its essential place in Yoga practice. Technically, he understood that it is in the union of polarities that life moves. But he didn’t realize the full implications of this, that love and its clarity is our natural state. His former student and lifelong friend, U.G. Krishnamurti, did and explained that Yoga practice is only useful, if it is an expression of our innate power. Krishnamacharya admitted to U.G. that he had no experience of what he had realized, a complete surrender of the mind to life. I think it’s vital that our idea of Yoga includes U.G.’s understanding, otherwise we are functioning within the limits of a hundred year old Brahmin’s worldview. He had a brilliant mind but it never let go its grip on him.

In the pervasive denial of the Feminine that still exists in Yoga, meditation as an escape from ourselves will hurt sooner or later. As the revelation of ourselves however, meditation is life, sex and spirit weaving us into the heart of the world. “Real silence is explosive”, said U.G..

Obscenity, Women and the Intelligent Force of Life

My mother’s first memory of me was the sound of my voice.  She said I screamed so loudly as I was carried away from her and down a hallway that a nurse remarked she had never heard a newborn cry with such strength.  We need our mothers and our mothers need us.  I was trying to make that clear but to no avail!  In Toronto hospitals in the 1960’s, all babies were immediately separated from their mothers and kept in nurseries.  Figuring out when to use my voice has been the focus of my life ever since.  My writing is the result.  Like my first howl, it comes from love.

 

To give birth is to be at the heart of life where the distinction between inner and outer dissolves and what was hidden comes to light.  Unbounded, every cell pulses to the thrum of the world and a woman knows who she is because she is in touch with every part of herself.  Yet fear of birth is everywhere, in our families, our popular culture and in the very “health care” systems we rely on.  It shrouds our collective mind so that what is meant to bring us into wisdom, thrusts us instead into shame.

Women have shared their birth stories with me ever since I gave birth almost twenty-two years ago now and the crazy thing is that it’s the women who have had births that deepened and enlarged their sense of self who are usually the ones most hesitant to tell their stories in public.  I know the feeling.  After a woman has told of being induced, for example, and she describes the pain she felt from it and the relief the epidural gave her and the hours and hours she lay numb on her back and how she waited to be fully dilated as her blood pressure and contractions and her baby’s heart tones were constantly monitored and a catheter was inserted into her and she wasn’t allowed to eat and she was filled with I.V. fluid and then her baby went into distress and was born through a caesarean section, it feels like the wrong time to share how I went through none of that and felt the strongest and most beautiful I ever had after I gave birth.

Women’s stories of the suffering they have endured in birth need to be told and heard.  It is vital to them and vital to us as a society.  They are stories that demand healing and action!  Along with these though, we need to hear of women’s joy.  We need to share how our bodies can bring us into pleasure and strength and faith in ourselves and our world.  I think these are actually the more dangerous stories.  They challenge.  They challenge our mothers and perhaps even our grandmothers.  They challenge the idea that our bodies are a source of an inherent weakness.  They challenge our collective idea of women.  There is camaraderie in suffering.  To declare that you live outside it is to stand alone.

Malala Yousafzai, the fourteen year old Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban, is finding her voice again.  The world watches.  It was her strength that made her a target, not her victimhood.   A spokesman for the Taliban explained that Malala’s writing was “obscene” and needed to be stopped.   To claim that feminine intelligence is dirty has been the way of the patriarchy for thousands of years. The Taliban’s tactics are brutal, and proudly public, but the same impulse is expressed in more subtle but no less destructive ways in how birthing women are treated in much of the world.  Most women either give birth without the medical safety net they need, or they suffer obstetrics’ assault.  Either way, we are hurt.  So are our babies.  Some of us die.  My midwife, Mary Sharpe, who is now the director of the midwifery education programme at Ryerson University, calls the situation a “global crisis”.  She writes,

The incidence of medical and surgical interventions for birth is increasing at an alarming rate.  In many settings, induction of labour and epidurals are the norm and caesarean birth rates range from 30% to 70% with a corresponding rise in maternal morbidity.  In under-resourced areas of the world, equitable access to midwifery and obstetrical care is still not possible, and the United Nations’ Fifth Millennium Goal to reduce maternal mortality by three quarters has not yet reached its target…efforts to improve infant and maternal mortality by moving births to institutionalized settings are in fact replicating the worst in Western maternity care; women give birth in crowded facilities, are separated from their family and loved ones and birth alone in a dehumanized, assembly-line fashion. 

This is taken from Joyful Birth, a book I contributed to that was put together by Lisa Doran and Lisa Caron.

While much of the world looks in reverence to the United States’ high tech medical system, it is not serving birthing women well.  The U.S. is one of four countries in the world where the maternal death rate is rising.  Perhaps obscene is a good word for this.  Ina May Gaskin, a world renowned American midwife and author, has created The Safe Motherhood Quilt Project to bring women’s unnecessary deaths into public awareness.  She said in a television interview recently that, “We let so many maternal deaths go invisible in these United States and a half to two thirds of the maternal deaths that take place aren’t reported to the CDC.  That’s very shocking because in most industrialized countries there’s a huge effort to identify every single death so that you can say, “OK, how do we reduce it next year?”   According to the number of maternal deaths that have actually been documented, the U.S. ranks somewhere between 40^th and 50^th in the world.  The highly medicalized approach to birth by American obstetricians is not working.  Out of fear of life and the intimate human connections that are a natural part of it, medicine tries to control birth and many women feel safe in its tight hand.  Salman Rushdie wrote, “Repression is a seamless garment” *  Despite feminism and the sexual revolution, we wear our constriction so comfortably in the West, we barely notice it.

So my words are for you, to speak to the fear you can’t help but absorb and to feed the faith that is your birthright.  We are the knowledge and strength we look for outside ourselves.   Denial of life’s power, its unfathomable intelligence to bring us into being and sustain us, has been acted out on our bodies and minds, and those of our children, over many, many generations now.  Unspeakable violence is our legacy and the impulse to heal it demands that words be found.  A coherent story must be told, not just of the suffering, but of the rightness in embracing all that we are.  All our lives depend on it.

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* Salman Rushdie, Shame (1983) from the first, unnumbered page of Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery.

You are the Source

 

You are your baby’s Source, its entire universe.  This is obvious!  And so what you eat literally shapes your baby, which isn’t a reason for guilt but for allowing yourself the pleasure of exercising your real power.  In Pam England’s book, Birthing from Within, she writes, “Technology is not a substitute for good nutrition.”  Ultrasounds and blood tests don’t heal or nourish.  You do.  By being in a close relationship with your self, it’s possible to really know what you and your baby need.  Nourishing your self is the single most important thing you can do for your combined well-being.

Eating regularly keeps your blood sugar stable and your energy levels consistent.  In the last few weeks before you give birth, you might need to eat frequent small meals as your stomach is compressed by your very full uterus.  Your blood volume increases by fifty percent, so drinking frequently, about three litres of fluid a day, supports your body and prevents bladder infections, headaches and early contractions. Your need for protein increases too, so include it in every snack and meal, when you can.  You will build strong, resilient tissue that will stretch rather than tear as you open to your baby.  Nuts and dried fruit are a portable, high fibre snack rich in protein, iron, calcium and folic acid, nutrients particularly needed in pregnancy.  Fresh fruit smoothies with yogourt or soy milk give a quick nutritious boost.  For lunch and dinner, a source of protein, whole grains and dark leafy vegetables should be the priority.

Also, the average Canadian diet is lacking in adequate levels of DHA (docosahexaenoic acid), an omega-3 fatty acid found predominantly in fish oil that is necessary for your baby’s optimal neurological development and is also good for you, reducing your risk of premature labour and postpartum depression.  Salmon, herring and sardines are a good source but a supplement ensures an adequate supply.

As a woman, you receive strong messages from our culture about how your body should look.  Being pregnant is an opportunity not to take them seriously as you get in greater touch with how you feel.  That’s where the wisdom lies.  And the beauty.

Heart of Yoga Series with Crescence Krueger

What makes yoga Yoga? Here is an opportunity to get to the crux of the matter.

Learn the technology of breath and body that makes practice a movement into the heart of what you are: the nurturing force of life.

I’m one of a few teachers in Canada who is passing on this knowledge. It is a revolution in understanding that recognizes the essential power of the Feminine in everyone and everything and offers a way to live in wholeness and grace.

Yoga teachers and new practitioners alike will get what they need in a small group setting where individual needs are honoured.

November 14, 21, 28, December 5, 12 & 19
Wednesdays from 7:00pm to 8:30pm at Eka Yoga Studio, 473A Church Street, 2nd floor, Toronto, ON  M4Y 2C5

9 hours over six weeks: $120.00

Registration is necessary: effie@ekayogatoronto.com; 647.748.4884

Robozo Workshop with Isabel Perez

Heart of Birth presents a

Rebozo Workshop with Isabel Perez

Learn how to use a rebozo, a Guatemalan/Mexican shawl, to support a woman during labour.  It’s like having another set of hands!  The rebozo can be used in any birthing environment to relax the mother, ease her pain and help with the positioning of her baby.  This will be an interactive workshop with plenty of time to practice techniques, ask questions and get an introduction to the skills and understanding of traditional midwifery.

Sunday, October 14th, 2012

10:00am to 3:00pm

Eka Yoga Centre, 473A Church Street, Toronto, ON  M4Y 2C5

(south of Wellesley Street)

Fee: $75.00

Please bring a flat bed sheet to practice with!

Some beautiful woolen rebozos from Guatemala will be available for sale; they can also be ordered through Isabel.

To register contact Crescence: crescence@heartofbirth.org; 416.994.4566

Isabel Perez has helped women give birth over the last 33 years.  She trained as a midwife with the renowned Ina May Gaskin, author of Spiritual Midwifery and recipient of ‘The Right Livelihood Award’ in 2011, known as the ‘Alternate Nobel Prize’.  Isabel worked with Ina May for four years on The Farm in Tennessee before moving to Toronto, where she continued to practice midwifery for eleven years, until 1993.  Since then, she has served women as a doula.  Isabel grew up in Guatemala, where the seed of her spiritual understanding was planted by her great-grandmother, a Mayan midwife, and her father, a shaman.  It flowers now in her birth work and teaching.  For more of Isabel’s story: https://heartofbirth.wordpress.com/2009/02/14/isabel-perez-a-life-in-birth/  

Red Thread Series 2012

Red Thread Series

with Crescence Krueger

There is a ‘red thread’ of feminine knowledge that has been passed down person to person since ancient times.  It leads to wisdom, a clear and compassionate understanding of life that grows out of an intimacy with experience rather than a separation from it.  The following independent yet interconnected programmes give you an opportunity to become part of a lineage of teachers and healers who hold this thread, a way into love.

Heart of Birth Doula Mentorship  May 2012- January 2013

“Relationship moves the life force, nothing else.”  Mark Whitwell 

If you want to be of real help to a birthing woman, you need to come into relationship with her.  Then life moves with grace.  Early on, Ina May Gaskin, the now iconic midwife, recognized the crucial role a woman’s relationships play in how she gives birth.  Our work together will be rooted in this knowledge and the programme begins and ends in your relationship to your self.

A personal practice of breathing, moving and sounding connects you to the power of what you are: the tangible source and force of life.  This connection is Yoga and it offers a profound understanding of the Feminine and a complete container for working with birth and with your own ongoing life.  All other paradigms can be integrated into it, including the medical.

“At first, do no harm!” is the ethical foundation of western medicine and yet the high caesarean rate in Toronto is evidence that women’s power is restricted and much harm is indeed being done.  In learning how to nurture a woman’s strength to receive life and give birth, you are joining a group of gentle revolutionaries.

For her life’s work, Ina May received ‘The Right Livelihood Award’ this past year.  It’s known as the “alternate Nobel Prize”.  Mark Whitwell is a deeply respected “teacher of the teachers” who is restoring the Feminine to its necessary primacy in our contemporary understanding of Yoga and Life.  They are leading the way for us.

Because the heart of birth work is realized in intimacy rather than ‘professional’ distance, the structure of our relationship will be a close one.  A one-on-one relationship with me will be combined with group process and coming into working relationships with fellow doulas, clients and the larger community.  You will be well supported in your autonomy!

The programme is nine months long; it has a depth to its structure and content that gives you a whole understanding of birth and your role in it. You will know how to be with another and how to be with yourself, fully alive.

You will become a certified Doula through ‘Heart of Birth’.

Fee: $2,700.00

Please contact me, crescence@heartofbirth.org, for a detailed description of the programme’s content and structure!

 Birth Circle  Winter 2012

 Birth Circle is a once-a-month gathering of women who nurture the heart of birth, found in the strength to receive life. Birth Circle encompasses us all, mothers, maidens, doulas, midwives, teachers, healers…come join us!

Yoga, sound work and discussion nurture our strength.  In enjoying our fundamental unity with each other, we can be of practical help to each other. Relationship moves the life force, nothing else.

Saturday February 25th, March 24^th, April 28^th from 3:00pm to 5:00pm at the Winchester Street Theatre, 80 Winchester Street, one block north of Carlton, one block east of Parliament.

Fee: $20.00; bring a friend and split the fee; students $15.00.

Heart of Yoga Prenatal Teacher Specialization

June – August 2012  (80 hours)

 Offers an understanding of Yoga in the context of the regeneration of Life.  Practice is the nurturing of a woman’s strength to receive Life in order to then give birth to it.  The heart of Yoga is expressed in her: Mother, Source.

For yoga teachers and teachers in training. An 80 hour programme, which satisfies Yoga Alliance’s requirements to be designated a specialist in Prenatal Yoga.

Please contact me crescence@heartofbirth.org for more details!

Heart of Yoga Foundational Teacher Training

Beginning at the end of September 2012 (200 hours)

Please contact me crescence@heartofbirth.org for more details!

Crescence Krueger has been a part of Toronto‘s yoga and birthing communities over the last twenty-one years. Her direct experience of Yoga began when she gave birth to her daughter and realized that we are all the source and force of Life, what the ancients called Shakti.  It has continued through nineteen years work as a Doula, helping other women give birth.  Her ability to integrate the wisdom of traditional midwifery into current birthing environments has been supported by a twenty year connection to Isabel Perez and Ina May Gaskin. Crescence passes on the beautifully simple and effective Yoga technology she has received from Mark Whitwell.  It restores the Feminine.  She teaches and mentors yoga teachers and doulas and writes. Real relationship is at the heart of life and she is committed to working in a way that makes it possible.

Heartbreak and Sanity

In the wake of the disintegration of  John Friend’s authority and empire, William Broad’s recent articles in the New York Times and Mark Singleton’s book a year or so ago, the question that everyone with even the mildest interest in yoga seems to be grappling with is, “What is yoga?”  In the responses I’ve heard, the answer is absent.

Assumptions need to be put aside because without understanding what yoga is, attempts to practice and teach it won’t work and people will continue to get hurt.  Whether they are in physical alignment or not, lying down or leaping through space, using props or just the bare floor, in heat or in cold, in an intimate group or a mass of hundreds, chanting Sanskrit or never letting a word of it pass their lips, studying ancient text or ignoring it, moving to music or in silence, working their edge or staying clear of it, eating vegan or raw or pure or whatever they feel like, paying fees or getting instruction for free, working with a teacher who socializes with students or stays aloof, who has thousands of hours of certified training or none, who is part of an ancient lineage or who gives no credence to the idea of spiritual authority, who has the anatomical training of a physiotherapist and the psychological insight of an analyst or who thinks only of light and love, none of this matters.  What does is that you practice in a way that gives you the strength to receive… an inhale, a feeling, the movement of life.  Its movement is yoga.  Its movement is you.

This is obvious when you give birth.  Then the vast intelligence of life pours through you in waves, bringing new life to light.  Any distinction between you and what’s moving you dissolves.  Coming into unity with your experience is the consequence of giving birth and it’s what yoga practice should give you too.  Both activities return you to your natural state, sahaj samadhi, pure love.

In love, polarities merge.  The polarities of spirit and sex and pleasure and pain are particularly fierce in a world that denies the inherent sacredness of life.  Birth reveals it.  We need to speak about the insight women’s experience gives us.  It shatters dogma. What brings a person inside you is what brings them out: sex. The hormones that bring men and women to orgasm are the same hormones that control the birth process.  While pain is part of birth, so is ecstasy.  To give birth autonomously, you must leave your mental framework and enter the unbounded territory of primal experience.  Then sexual energy moves, unconfined by cultural definition and the manipulation of self and other that comes with it.  New life moves too and the sexual body and the spiritual body are known to be one.  Every cell in blood, bone and brain vibrates in harmony with life’s descent.  We are the source and the force of life, what yoga calls Shakti, so using yoga to make you somehow more spiritual is nonsensical.

Culturally, we are so very confused about love and sex.  We set up huge obstacles to being in relationship and it starts at birth.  The medical paradigm doesn’t understand how life works, only how to intervene when it doesn’t.  In the face of drugs and surgery, mother and child lose touch with each other and their ability to be as one disintegrates.  In a similar way, when yoga is misunderstood as a series of interventions that transform us into something else, something more beautiful, something more spiritual, they disassociate us from what we already are and become an assault on our integrity as life itself.  We lose our selves.

It looks like we are beginning to recognize the violence and betrayal.  But I don’t think the source of it is yet understood.  Denial of life runs deep.  It’s old and its craziness infiltrates every bit of us.  Without a technical understanding of how to develop the strength to receive your life, any attempt to “do yoga” is not going to work.  Adding beautiful words and concepts onto dysfunctional technology won’t help.  It makes things worse, intensifying the sense of lack and longing that grows in the discrepancy between how things feel and how we imagine they should be.

Mark Whitwell has been an enormous help in my understanding of all this.  What is missing in our collective understanding of yoga is a connection to life in all its beauty and pain.  When UG Krishnamurti realized this, he called it his Calamity.  It hurt to have his mind let go of its grip on his body, just like it hurts to give birth. UG insisted there’s no higher state to get to.  We are yoga.  Coming into love is heartbreaking.  And the only sane thing we can do.

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