Reflections on Kaiut Yoga: Collection 2
Set your sails for progression. Whatever is stuck in your system is about to die.
Progression doesn’t feel right because it is new. Every cell in your body wants to stay the same. When you change something in the system, every part of you must learn how to walk again.
Would you rather hurt while healing yourself or hurt from injury and illness? If you face pain, everything changes. If you try to avoid pain or use your practice to make it go away, eventually you will have unavoidable pain.
Pain is a layer around the restriction in our system. Pain is the end result of compensatory processes caused by an original restriction. To get to the root of our suffering, we must face our pain.
Be non-aggressive, objective and precise. No thinking. No analyzing. Just feeling. Just feel.
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Always go back to nature. Nature finds the easiest way.
Can you imagine a tiger warming up before a hunt?
The work is all about taking us back to our original nature, regaining our capability to adapt.
“... it is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.” -Leon C. Megginson
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Every basic need you have comes with pleasure. Breathing, eating, drinking, pooping, farting, peeing, orgasming, sleeping, stretching...
My Kaiut regulars and I often joke about how hard it is to describe Kaiut to people. We always come back to, “There’s just something about it you have to experience for your self.”
You can’t explain it, but you know it’s right because it feels right to your inner nature. Like breathing, you feel a need to keep doing it.
Practice must be an act of self-love. Is your practice sustainable for when you are 85? A practice that creates fast change is not sustainable.
Everything in nature that changes fast is destructive. Nature takes time to grow. Healing takes slow, consistent growth.
Challenge your intelligence and willingness, not your body. Do not seek big, fast shifts.
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Less is more. Don’t demand too much of the body—it diminishes the effectiveness of the position. The more subtle the process, the better.
Keep it simple. No metaphors, no distractions. Get quiet and pay attention to what’s actually happening. Just back off and let nature work.
Don’t fill the silence with fluff. Useful, practical silence is fertile ground for practice.
We have dissociated yoga from relaxation. Effort and control do not bring meditation. Meditation comes through relaxation. It is a force of nature, something that happens to us which cannot be created or performed. Meditation is a non-doing state.
Meditation is not separation from the body. Every pose is a body anchor for you to experience the present moment.
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
-Blaise Pascal
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The seed of discomfort is always in the same place. It is not always seen, and it will show up in different places and sensations.
Research the restriction from different positions. Every angle of motion in every joint is important.
We aren’t going for maximum movement in the poses. We are researching what we’ve been lacking all along the spectrum of movement.
Progress does not mean more flexibility.
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The main problem is a lack of adaptability. The main goal is to redevelop adaptability.
Break the expectations of your students. Don’t allow them to anticipate what’s next. With anticipation comes muscle memory. The inner nature of our being is fluid and adaptable. Muscle memory goes against nature and removes free will. It is helpful on the battlefield but not on the yoga mat.
If you never vary your pose, you are not exploring the full functioning of your joints. When you don’t use a function, you lose it, and then trying to use that function becomes painful.
You must target the seed of restriction.
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We are compensation machines. The supercomputer of our brain will do anything to give you what you ask it for. You want your hands to touch your feet in a forward fold? The brain will help you bypass your restrictions and get you there in a completely unsustainable way.
We have trained ourselves not to feel our pain and restrictions. We spend time not feeling our pain, and when it flares, we run to the masseuse, acupuncturist, doctor, yoga instructor, drugs... This adds complexity to the situation.
The goal is not to be pain free. The goal is to sync our selves with our inner nature and eventually the system will fall in line. When we relax, we let go of our compensation mechanisms, and we can feel the restrictions.
The poses are you rebuilding the skills inherent to your nature. Yoga was developed as humans made the shift from hunter-gatherer tribalism to farming and livestock societies. We walked away from a way of living that was keeping our nature alive, so the practice of yoga was made to give that nature back to us.
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We used to sleep wherever we were; on rocks, in different shapes, etc. Our necessities were built before our societies were.
Too much emphasis on comfort leads to a lack of adaptability. The more you change your environment (dim lights, temperature modulation, extra pillows and blankets, etc), the more you reduce adaptability.
We have to change our understanding of what we want from the practice. We want pure feedback and to trace the sensations to see if there is reactivity (fear, defensiveness, emotion, etc). It is ok to be in pain as long as you can be passive. If not, back out and be softer in your approach.
We want the system to enjoy learning where the restrictions are. The temptation is to go deeper, stronger and faster, but this is the opposite of the work we need.
Thinking is the disease. Feeling is the cure.
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We stand from our blockages. When one is gone, where do you stand? The system will react strongly, fight back, or bring up old stuff that’s been buried.
The ideal is to create practices that deliver consistent and significant changes at a pace where they go almost unnoticed.
The practice is about wasting time productively. Find the balance of intensity and passivity.
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Don’t expect mild results. The benefits we usually expect from our practice are the same ones we expect from a trip to the spa—reduction of pain and release of stress. You must expect the results to be remarkable, or they won’t.
What is doable is unknown, but our preconceived notions cloud our perception. To understand the Yoga system, don’t turn to anatomy books, turn to books on quantum physics and neuroplasticity. Turn to feeling.
Keep your mind open to what’s happening. When nature takes over, nothing follows the same rules as before. Expect great things.
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If we aren’t progressing, we are dying.
Do you have a real willingness to dismantle yourself? It feels like Hell.
We want everything in the system to be progressing together. Don’t just drill one thing because you think you need more of it; don’t burn the tool by overusing it.
Diversify. Not specializing the practice and keeping it generalized is ideal. There is no one right place to be. All the positions and angles are right.
Don’t go for a perfected practice, go for a practice that is always progressing.
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The more conservative you are, the better. Pile up layers of small results consistently over time. Then the system will be primed and craving pressure and thus progression.
Eventually, once you have the slow, gentle practice in your memory, you will explore pain.
People have diseases. That doesn’t mean the conditions have to define their existence or that they have to suffer their restrictions. Everything around the condition is the main cause of suffering, not the condition itself.
Lastly, Kaiut yoga is the serious bomb diggity, and you should try it.
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